tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6957799448843186912024-02-18T17:43:13.841-08:00 We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of InsanityAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-42137599723865716172015-01-29T08:47:00.002-08:002015-01-29T08:47:48.246-08:00A Philosophical Musical<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The philosophy in "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity" was developed by Arthur Hancock and Kathleen Brugger. Arthur is a singer/songwriter, and while Kathleen put the material together in a book, Arthur created a musical. Through humor, compassion, and deep insight into the human condition, Arthur's songs compellingly communicate the basics of our philosophy. </div>
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Arthur has created a new art form--philosophical theater. This work is intended to be performed with actors bringing the imagery of the songs to life. </div>
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The musical work, which is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjkyCIxjLGHXRuz5T35jJcg/feed">now on YouTube</a>, contains 16 songs, which are meant to be listened to in a particular order. Please click on "playlist" or listen to the songs in the order in which they are listed on the home page.</div>
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The first song is entitled "Not Right in My Mind":</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-71145432716672252122014-12-15T09:50:00.001-08:002014-12-15T09:50:13.090-08:00Mind Creates Reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">My husband
has been enjoying a nostalgic trip to the early 1960’s since he’s found a
YouTube channel that streams “Mr. Ed” shows. Mr. Ed was a horse that could
talk, but he would only do it with his owner. Mr. Ed was quite neurotic and was
always getting into various difficulties (it seems that the basic premise of
the show was so outrageous that the writers realized they could take it just
about anywhere). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">When Mr. Ed
was “talking,” his lips would move and a deep voice would speak. It’s a funny
experience because part of your mind knows—of course—that that voice isn’t
coming from the horse, but another part suspends disbelief and all of a sudden
you’re ascribing human thoughts and emotions to Ed. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Ed">According to Wikipedia</a>, the
horse’s trainer at first got the horse to move his lips by putting nylon string
in his mouth, but it didn’t take long for Mr. Ed to start moving his lips when
touched on the front hoof by his trainer.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">One of the
basic premises of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Are ALL Innocent by
Reason of Insanity</i> is that we are not aware of reality itself, but a
mind-generated version of reality. Our senses take in various perceptions, and
these are filtered through both hard-wired circuits (inherited from our animal
ancestors) that construct a version of physical reality, plus beliefs,
assumptions, and memories we have formed in our lifetimes. All this filtration
and reality-construction happens <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i>
we become aware of the perceptions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The illusion
that Mr. Ed is talking is one example of the distortion caused by this process.
When we see a mouth moving—even if it’s a horse’s mouth—and hear words being
spoken, our minds naturally link them up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ventriloquists
exploit this same illusion to trick us into believing that their voice is
coming out of their puppet’s mouth. I love Triumph the Insult Comic Dog by
Robert Smigel. Triumph is a crude rubber dog, and it’s absurdly obvious that
“his” voice is coming from off-screen, yet the illusion is created that Triumph
is really speaking or singing. In a <a href="http://youtu.be/LHa7iQJ_fEw">video
on Conan Late Night</a> about the cruise ship that lost power in early 2013 in
the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Smigel plays with the ventriloquism illusion. Sometimes
the camera backs off and you can see Smigel’s mouth moving when it’s supposed to
be Triumph speaking; at other times you see a close-up of Triumph “speaking”
and his mouth isn’t moving. My mind said, “Something’s wrong! How can he be
speaking if his mouth isn’t moving?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In other words, my brain was totally buying into the illusion.<a href="" name="ref_en_5_back"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The art of
foley is another example of how our brain’s processing of visual and aural cues
can create an illusion of reality. We see someone’s leg breaking and we hear
celery snapping, we see someone being punched and we hear a raw steak being
hit, we see someone riding a horse and hear two coconut halves banging together
(see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIV4poUZAQo&list=UUGm3CO6LPcN-Y7HIuyE0Rew">Monty
Python’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Holy Grail</i></a> for an
amusing riff on this illusion; at the very beginning of the clip you can see
the servant with coconuts),<a href="" name="ref_en_6_back"></a> and we really believe
we’re hearing the actual sound of whatever action we’re seeing. I’ve thought
about this while watching action movies—how does anyone know what the sound of
a fifty-foot monster kicking around buses on a city street sounds like?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I saw a
short film on Vimeo recently that provides an example of another way the brain’s
reality-construction algorithms distort reality: we tend to interpret actions
as the volitional choices of an agent. Psychologists have described how
research subjects will watch shapes move on a computer screen, and then come up
with stories that explain why the shapes move the way they do. “The triangle
wanted to get away from the circle,” they might say. Our minds were clearly
designed to look for signs of agency in the world, and then come up with
explanations for our observations that ascribe intent to the moving object. You
can see how this would have been a benefit to us in this past. For example,
imagine seeing grass moving in the wind, and a lion stalking through the grass.
We distinguish between the movement of grass and lion, because the lion has the
intent to move towards the antelope to attack, while the grass’s movement has
no intent, it is the passive response to the wind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Watch “<a href="https://vimeo.com/90603521">A Girl Named Elastika</a>” and notice the
sensations of belief popping up, that even in this short animation using
push-pins and rubber bands, the illusion of action and volition seem real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Optical
illusions are a great way to explore how the mind creates our reality.
Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto gave a TED talk in 2009 entitled “Optical
Illusions Show How We See.” One of Mr. Lotto’s demonstrations involves a
drawing of various geometric shapes. He isolated two sections of the drawing
that conveyed exactly the same visual information to the viewer’s brain—same
shape, size, and color. Then he revealed where these two areas fit into the
larger diagram: one was the shaded side of a yellow box while the other was an
illuminated side of an orange box. They may have conveyed exactly the same
information to my retina, but when I looked at the complete picture I saw
different colored boxes, one in shade and the other not. The two surfaces didn’t
look the same to me, even though I knew they were identical.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria;">The lesson I
take from this is the importance of humility: always be willing to question my
perception of reality. If I can be so wrong about reality as to think a horse
is talking, what else might I be deluded about?</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-74278535126758257122014-03-22T07:16:00.001-07:002014-03-22T07:16:50.158-07:00Personal Zeitgeist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">On an internet forum I
participate in someone started a thread called “personal zeitgeist.” She asked,
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">W</span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">hat do you think contributed to your
own current set of intuitions, worldview, etc.? For example:</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> - Noteworthy historical events that really made an impression
during a formative period in your thinking</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">- Pop culture of the time</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">- Personal experiences</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">- Geographic region you were born in/local culture/travel, etc.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #2a2c3a; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">- Personal values, as in it was part of your nature to value
critical thinking, emotions, religious beliefs, etc. </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I found it quite an
amazing process to write a list in response. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Are all Innocent by Reason of Insanity</i> I talk about what I call
My Story, and how we all write narratives that define our lives. The beliefs
and assumptions that we form in our early development become filters of our
perceptions; these filters construct our mind-generated reality (and it’s the
confusion of our mind-generated reality with actual reality that makes us
insane). This mind-generated reality is our narrative, our Story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In the book I talked
about the influence of my family and some of my personality quirks, but her
question helped me frame My Story in a broader sense, based on the cultural
influences of my time. Here’s what I posted:</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria;">Childhood in the
60’s. I thought revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race,
gender, sexual) should be easy.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria;">Travel to the Soviet
Union in 1979. I realized my government had been lying to me my entire life (trust
me, it was obvious to a 21-year-old that the USSR at that point was not the
threat it was made out to be).</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria;">My parents’ divorce
when I was 14. Agony at the time but started me questioning everything. My
family had seemed like “Leave it to Beaver” and then it all crumbled overnight,
out of the blue. Nothing seemed dependable anymore, but I also became less
interested in living like everyone else.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria;">Learning, when I was
about 12, that Jesus was a special case, the only son of God, and the rest of
us are cursed with original sin. This really pissed me off; I couldn’t see any
point in Christianity after that.</span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">After I wrote the
line, “revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race, gender, sexual)
should be easy,” I realized what a defining influence that perspective has had
on my life. It has certainly skewed my perception of politics; I’ve been angry
and bitter about what I saw as lack of progress because I couldn’t understand
why things didn’t change faster/more easily. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What also comes clear
to me from this list is a problem with trust—numbers 2, 3, and 4 are all about
feeling betrayed, lied to, made a fool of. And the truth is a good portion of
my adult life was spent trying not to be a fool—I was a cynical skeptic
distrustful of any organization, be it environmental, political, or spiritual.
I never wanted to be a member. I didn’t want to get trapped in the conventional
world because it was, I believed, built on a pack of lies, so I have lived an
alternative lifestyle on the fringes of society. Those perceptions made before
I was 21 have had an enduring effect on my life. Now I can see why I’ve never
been a “joiner,” the pejorative term I used when someone asked why I wasn’t
part of a local environmental group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What I learned from
this little exercise is that understanding your personal zeitgeist is a good
idea—it can help you become more aware of the assumptions and beliefs skewing
your perception.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-89776077821527534022014-02-25T08:51:00.001-08:002014-02-25T08:51:46.972-08:00Crazy Means Nothing Left to Hide<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A friend of
mine loves to sing and play the guitar, but she has been too shy to play for
Arthur, my husband, who is a professional musician. One night recently when she
was visiting she grabbed Arthur’s guitar and played a song for us. When we
expressed our delight in her performance, she said, “Now that I’ve read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/Book.html">We Are ALL Innocent</a></i> and realize that I’m
crazy, it was liberating. I knew that it wouldn’t matter to you how it sounded,
because you know I’m nuts!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Crazy means
nothing left to hide. Am I less than perfect? Big deal…I’m crazy. Did I do
something embarrassing in the past? I was nuts. Did I do something I feel
guilty about? I was delusional. Whatever I did, it was motivated by the
confusion in my mind, the programming of beliefs and assumptions that distorted
my worldview. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">One of the
benefits of recognizing my craziness has been the ability to laugh at myself,
to stop taking myself so seriously. I no longer have to hide mistakes, or try
to explain them away. I can share personal details in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Are ALL Innocent</i>, and on internet forums using my real name,
because they don’t matter anymore. Crazy people do crazy things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In addition,
many of us spend an inordinate amount of time trying to promote our good sides,
hoping that by an engaging display we can keep others distracted from seeing our
warts and flaws. When we no longer feel the need to hide parts of ourselves, we
can relax and just be ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In our
culture there’s something almost everyone hides—their sexuality. We are
programmed to believe sex is dirty, and the sex act is obscene, and it’s wrong
to feel aroused except in very circumscribed situations (like with your
spouse). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As I
mentioned in an <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2014/01/does-sex-belong-in-book-about-insanity.html">earlier post</a>, I’ve gotten criticism for addressing sex in WAAI.
Some have intimated that sexuality doesn’t belong in a self-help book that
isn’t explicitly about sex. This stems from the insane belief that sex should
and could be split off from the rest of life. Others have warned me that
including sex would limit my audience, because people would be reluctant to
share the book with others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But again,
crazy means nothing left to hide! I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say
that sexual problems are rampant in our culture. Personally I think this is
because we cannot discuss our sexuality freely, as we can so many other aspects
of our lives. So our problems stay hidden away where they fester and grow
worse. Confusion about sex was just another one of my issues, like insecurity
and competition, so why shouldn’t I share about it in the hope that it would
help another better understand their sexuality? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In this
spirit, my partner in life and in the development of the philosophy behind
WAAI, Arthur Hancock, has written a memoir entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.arthurbhancock.com/exposing-myself/">Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth</a></i>. In this book he honestly
reveals his obsessions with sex, ending a lifetime of hiding the shame and
guilt about his sexual proclivities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Arthur had a
life-changing experience at the age of 28, when he realized how superficial his
perception of the world really was. The next forty years have been a quest to
understand this experience, an attempt to seek truth over lies and love over
lust, in the midst of such adventures as playing folk music in St. Augustine.
Florida in the midst of a major civil rights confrontation, and traveling to
Nepal and returning paralyzed from the neck down (the year of recovery in a
rehab center led to some unbelievable sexual adventures).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Exposing Myself</span></i><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> is a great companion to WAAI, as Arthur not only takes the reader
through the development of the philosophy of universal insanity, but illustrates
in his own life how the recognition of his insanity has removed shame and
guilt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Recently
Arthur said that publishing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Exposing
Myself</i> has been of great therapeutic value. By exposing himself he no
longer fears his inner blackmailer of ego (remember when you did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>? <a href="http://www.arthurbhancock.com/cartoons/">See the cartoon version</a> of this inner blackmailer at Arthur's website entitled "Why the unexamined life is so popular"). Arthur no longer has to be
fixated on hiding his sexual shame and self-hatred by pretending to be
superior. This has given him a sense of peace; he is free to simply be who he
is; he no longer has to hide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-83721129304920690362014-02-14T13:37:00.000-08:002014-02-14T13:37:43.725-08:00Eckhart Tolle: The Human Race is Insane<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In his
bestselling book, <i><a href="http://www.eckharttolle.com/books/now/">The Power of Now</a>,</i> Eckhart Tolle uses the words
“insane” or “insanity” over thirty times to describe human thinking. For
example:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The
mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of insanity.
Almost everyone is suffering from this illness in varying degrees. The moment
you realize this, there can be no more resentment. How can you resent someone’s
illness? The only appropriate response is compassion…Nobody chooses
dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity…It always looks as if
people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its
conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice
do you have? None. You are not even there.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Mr. Tolle
uses the term “conditioned patterns,” I use “mind-generated reality,” but we
are talking about the same process. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/">We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</a></i> argues that all of our perceptions
are filtered through assumptions and beliefs before they reach our
consciousness, so what we see is a subjective version of reality that has been
slanted towards our world-view. We confuse this subjective mind-generated reality
with objective reality; we are deluded about what is real. This is why we are
all insane.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The subtitle
of my book is “The Mechanics of Compassion,” because, as Mr. Tolle says, once
you realize that people’s minds are dysfunctional, that they are in face
insane, you can no longer be angry with them or hate them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Mr. Tolle also refers to the
human race as insane in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.eckharttolle.com/books/newearth/">A New Earth</a></i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">One can go so far as to say that
on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this
insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say,
ego…Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of
the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive
it as somebody’s identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much
easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally
anymore…Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the
same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">If you’d like to learn more about
how this insanity works, <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39503832/We%20Are%20ALL%20Innocent%20by%20Reason%20of%20Insanity%20preview.pdf">click her</a>e to read the first four chapters of <i>We are
ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</i> (free). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-36056152311896377542014-01-28T10:28:00.000-08:002014-01-28T10:28:00.774-08:00Does Sex Belong in a Book about Insanity?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/Book.html">We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity</a></i>
I use my life to provide examples for various points I make, and this includes
some discussion of sexuality. When I am illustrating my insanity, I discuss
problems I have had with family, relationships, jobs, self-esteem, etc.; I also
include some related to sex. When I describe the lessons I’ve learned—acceptance,
humility, compassion, and love—I also include some lessons I learned about sex.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Some readers
have criticized me for this inclusion. The sense I get from these people is
it’s okay for me to talk about how insanity has impacted my life in every area
except one: sex. Somehow that’s out-of-bounds in a book that’s not specifically
about sex. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This is a
book about insanity, both personal and cultural. If insanity doesn’t describe
most cultures’ attitude towards sexuality, what does? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">American
culture has an incredibly puritanical attitude towards sex: it’s dirty, and it’s
damaging to young people and other innocents, so just don’t talk about it. But
I would counter that sexual problems are rampant in our culture, and a lot of
the reason has to do with our cultural attitudes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity</span></i><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> argues that every society develops a “consensus reality,” which
is a collective mind-generated reality (my definition of insanity is: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">confusing our mind-generated reality with
actual reality</i>). Our individual realities are constructed within the collective
reality of our culture. The American (and almost every other nation’s)
consensual reality includes the belief “sex is dirty,” and we all imbibe that
belief with our mother’s milk. As a result almost everyone in our culture is
crazy in the area of sex.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Sex is a
natural function of our bodies, like eating, yet we get no guidance from our
parents and teachers about it. We're taught how to eat with a fork, how to use
the toilet, how to wash ourselves, how to spell and do math, and how to drive a
car. But we're not taught anything about how to have sex—because it's dirty. We
might have sex education in school, but that’s mostly educating us about the
consequences of sex—pregnancy and disease. So almost everyone grows up
conflicted, confused, and privately believing that he or she is a monster for
the "sick" fantasies and desires in his/her mind. We're taught that
sex is something you have to hide. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">No wonder half
of all marriages end in divorce, with sexual problems as a major cause. <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/when-sex-leaves-the-marriage/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0">Studies
have shown</a> that 15 percent of married couples have not had sex in the last
six months to a year (or more). No wonder that loads of people sneak around
behind their spouse's back to have affairs or watch porn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A hotel manager once told me that
during his career, the highest percentage of guests watching X-rated in-room
movies occurred during an evangelical convention—the guests were in a place where
they thought they could watch porn in secret (not knowing their program
selections were being notated)…and they did watch. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In the chapter entitled My
Story, where I lay out some of the major issues in my life, I wrote: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">At one point in my
life I read a lot of spiritual books, and always I would wait hopefully for
some advice on how to see sex from a more enlightened perspective. It always
seemed as if the author either ignored sex completely, or did a whitewash of
the subject, as if they were as confused as I was.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I determined <i>not</i> to
do this. </span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have a vision of
sexuality that I call "clean sex," which is sex freed of the beliefs
and preconceptions we’ve been burdened with, pre-eminently including “sex is
dirty.” Clean sex is like meditating while having sex, but in the nicest way—no
thoughts getting in the way of feeling the exquisiteness of the sensations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Sexual energy is always flowing,
like all forms of life energy. You can open yourself to tap into that energy
flow at any time, and if you stay open you can ride that sexual energy wave
into places of bliss, without need for exotic tricks to keep you interested. I
think of it this way: when I want to have sex I shift my awareness to tap into
the sexual energy, then I get out on the leading edge and ride the wave
wherever it goes. It’s all about staying right there on the edge of the wave,
not thinking about anything, just moving with the flow of energy.</span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Here’s a chart illustrating
some of the ideas:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria;"> </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b>Clean Sex</b>.................................<b>Dirty Sex</b></span><b> </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Present in body...................Absent in mind</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Spontaneous..........................Ritualistic (same
combination of elements)</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">No goal.......................................Orgasm-oriented</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Whole self oriented.............Genital or
fetish-oriented</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Love.............................................Lust</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Variations.................................Fixed theme</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Heightens unity....................Heightens separation</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Sane……………….……….........Insane</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;">There are
many benefits to recognizing our insanity, both personally and collectively.
Chief among these benefits will be a new attitude towards sexuality.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-69938606925079329742014-01-01T08:22:00.000-08:002014-01-01T08:22:36.153-08:00Nouns are Delusional<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A friend of
mine recently said to me, “nouns are delusional.” When I asked him to
elaborate, he said he was quoting a physicist, but couldn’t remember who.
Basically the idea is that nouns presuppose a static, unchanging object. Modern
physics has shown that everything is changing all the time and that matter is
energy, so nouns should actually be verbs to bring in the dimension of time and
change. Instead of Kathleen, I should be called “Kathleening.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I spent a
little time googling the idea and found that Buckminster Fuller described
himself as a verb. He published a book in 1970 called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Seem-Be-Verb-Environment-Future/dp/B0006CZBHO">I
Seem to Be a Verb: Environment and Man’s Future</a> </i>in which he wrote<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">:</i> </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I live on Earth at present, and I
don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a
noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the u<span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">niverse</span>.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">My friend’s
comment resonated with me because I had just read about the philosophy of
Alfred North Whitehead, which also emphasizes the need to bring the element of
time into our understanding of matter. From Rupert Sheldrake’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery-ebook/dp/B0076PGG6Y">Science
Set Free</a>:</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Whitehead
was probably the first philosopher to recognize the radical implications of
quantum physics. He realized that the wave theory of matter destroyed the old
idea of material bodies as essentially spatial, existing at points in time, but
without any time within them. According to quantum physics, every primordial
element of matter is ‘an organized system of vibratory streaming of energy.’ A
wave does not exist in an instant, it takes time; its waves connect the past
and the future. He thought of the physical world as made up not of material
objects but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual entities</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">events</i>. An event is a happening or a
becoming. It has time within it. It is a process, not a thing.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Whitehead’s
philosophy is known as “process philosophy,” and its ontology (the study of
being) replaces Being with Becoming. Nouns are objects that exist (being).
Verbs are processes that become.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This has
made me realize that the conception of static, unchanging objects is just
another part of our delusional mind-generated reality. When I think of objects,
I think of them as unchanging entities; change might happen but that doesn’t
alter the essence of the object. For example, my car: I think of it as a
wondrous mechanical device composed of an engine, transmission, wheels, and the
body that I sit in (among other parts). Those things are the essence of the
object “car.” When I think of it out there in my driveway, I think of a
completely static and unchanging object. When a sparkplug gets clogged, or the
transmission goes out, I think that something broke, and when it is fixed it
goes back to normal. “Fixing” implies getting it back to its “fixed,” static
object state. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What if
instead I visualized my car as a verb, as a changing stream of processes? It’s
actually instantly clear to me that this is a much better way to look at the
car—what it is today is the sum of ten years of existence, of driving and
sitting, all the dings on the doors and sludge in the transmission, and it will
be different this afternoon after I drive to the Y.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have
always loved to look at trees in the winter, and this idea of “nouns should be
verbs” is the reason why—without the leaves you can see the history of an
individual tree written in the shape of its limbs. But now I realize that I was
still seeing the tree as a static object, frozen in a moment in time, and not
as a flowing movement of process in time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">When I apply
this concept to myself it’s liberating. I’m not stuck as some unchanging “me,”
I am a constantly evolving Becoming. I’m a work in progress. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-76801747726694290962013-12-12T07:51:00.000-08:002013-12-12T07:51:10.069-08:00Deepak Chopra: We Live in a Lunatic Asylum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In an
interview in October, Deepak Chopra said, “I had this moment in meditation
where I realized we’re living in a lunatic asylum. There’s no other way to
describe it. Everything that we see is madness, but it’s normal…So, we’re in
it, there’s no escaping the lunatic asylum. You can choose to be an inmate, or
you can pick up your visitor’s badge. That day, I chose to pick up my visitor’s
badge.” (begins at 9:25)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EW8X63TZ2-c" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">When he said
“it’s normal,” he kind of waved his arm around and paused—that’s what the “…” means;
I didn’t cut anything out. Chopra meant, I believe, that it’s difficult to see
the madness because we have been conditioned to believe that it is normal. It’s
like the old joke about the fish in the sea having trouble with the concept of
“water.” We live within a consensual reality created by our culture and family.
We have to take on the beliefs and assumptions of our culture in order to
survive, and these beliefs and assumptions skew our perceptions before we even
become aware of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">An example
of consensual reality from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Are ALL
Innocent by Reason of Insanity</i>: long ago humans divided the Earth into
countries and have so completely forgotten that the divisions are arbitrary
that we have fought endless battles over the invented boundaries. When people
first saw the photos of our planet taken by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s it
was a revelation—there were no lines like on our maps and globes! And people had
the dawning awareness that all those arbitrary borders are irrelevant when you
comprehend the vastness of the blackness surrounding our precious globe of
life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Recognizing
the insanity, seeing the delusions, allows us to be a “visitor”; this
perspective means we have compassion for the inmates still trapped in their
delusions, and compassion for ourselves every day we forget to pick up our
visitor badge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-46545329953424085252013-12-05T08:12:00.000-08:002013-12-05T08:12:48.634-08:00Expectations Shape our Reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The claim
that everyone is insane is based on the premise that no one sees reality as it
is. Our perceptions are heavily filtered by our beliefs, assumptions,
preconceptions, and expectations before we become aware of them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Evolutionary
psychologists have theorized that the brain evolved to make assumptions about
the future based on what we have experienced in the past. This is an efficient
use of our brain’s resources because it helps us focus our attention on what is
important to our survival. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For example,
an animal might be attacked at a waterhole. It would then form the assumption
that waterholes are a place where there is an increased chance of
danger/predators. So the animal stays alert every time it’s at the waterhole
and expects predators. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In his
best-seller <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incognito,</i> David Eagleman
says expectations are vital to our ability to see. He included an illustration
that looked to me as if it was just random blobs of light and dark. Eagleman
said most people see it that way: without any expectation for what we should
see, our brains don’t see anything. On the next page he gives a clue about the
image, and once I knew what to expect, when I looked at it again I instantly
saw it. Days later when I looked again the image jumped out at me as if it were
obvious. The brain, Eagleman writes, is constantly engaged in the activity of
comparing our expectation of what we should see with the information coming
from our senses: “What all this tells us is that perception reflects the active
comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Many years
ago a fascinating experiment demonstrated the influence of expectations on our
perception of reality. The study built on the “halo effect,” a well-known
cognitive bias: people who are attractive are judged to be more competent and
have better personalities than those who are less attractive. Mark Snyder, the
lead scientist, called <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.335.3131&rep=rep1&type=pdf">the
study</a> an “attempt to demonstrate that stereotypes [another word for expectations]
may create their own social reality.”</span></div>
<a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The
researchers recruited male and female subjects, 51 of each gender, who were
told the research was about the process by which people get to know one
another. The experiment involved one-on-one phone conversations between a man
and a woman. The males received biographical info and a photo of the female
they would talk to, while the females received nothing. However, the photo was
not of the actual woman; the researchers chose two categories of photos, either
attractive or unattractive, and randomly assigned them to the female
participants.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The couple
had a ten-minute conversation about anything they wanted, and this conversation
was recorded. Afterwards, both men and women completed questionnaires about
their impressions of their partner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The men who
had a partner with an attractive photo were more likely to assess that woman as
sociable, interesting, and fun, while those with an unattractive partner rated
her as awkward, serious, and socially inept. What became clear to the
researchers was that the men who believed they had an attractive partner were
more cordial, interesting, and engaged during the conversation. The women
picked up on this interest and were more dynamic in return.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Then the
researchers edited the recorded conversations so that only the female part of
the conversation remained. Other subjects listened to the edited recordings and
rated the women’s personalities—based solely on the women’s half of the
conversations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What is
truly amazing is that this second group of subjects rated the women in a way
that aligned with the fake photos. In other words, the expectations of the
original men created an objective reality that was so clear that unbiased
listeners formed the same reality in their minds. The researchers concluded:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“What
initially had been reality in the minds of the men became reality in the
behavior of the women….being thought of as beautiful made the women actually
think of themselves as beautiful and exhibit ‘beauty’ in their conversations.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This may in
fact explain the halo effect: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“[T]he
physically attractive may actually come to behave in a friendly, likable,
sociable manner, not because they necessarily possess these dispositions, but
because the behavior of others elicits and maintains behaviors taken to be
manifestations of such traits.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Click <a href="http://www.asc.upenn.edu/courses/comm360/snyder.pdf">here</a> to read a
short essay by Snyder, the lead researcher. He ends it with a question: “Might
not other important and widespread social stereotypes—particularly those
concerning sex, race, social class, and ethnicity—also channel social
interaction in ways that create their own social reality?” [Mark Snyder, “When
Belief Creates Reality: The Self-Fulfilling Impact of First Impressions on
Social Interactions.”]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As I was
working on this essay I happened to see <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/03/1259767/-Donald-Glover">a
cartoon by Keith Knight</a>, about the social realities created by the
stereotypes white people have of blacks. The cartoon was inspired by an
interview Knight had seen with actor Donald Glover (a black man). Glover said
in an interview: “We were in the airport and I was waiting in line at the ATM
and there was a guy in front of me getting money…I came up and he got nervous
so I went to the side and waited for him to finish…<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I don’t think white people know how much effort in my day is put into
making them feel comfortable</b>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNUS4-qFZ_8xpjr_ZhO3vtOEysHyy23rmEt0XgTBmsJg0i50jMMnBzh_yBpGOwisCzJrfpZwK3MIx9-GQaZy8TP-TRN4VGx5iuELXG6KLDQGJ26XtXLU_vGetSD3VDGptAseMqX69ae9Je/s1600/expectations+create+reality+post+-+waai.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNUS4-qFZ_8xpjr_ZhO3vtOEysHyy23rmEt0XgTBmsJg0i50jMMnBzh_yBpGOwisCzJrfpZwK3MIx9-GQaZy8TP-TRN4VGx5iuELXG6KLDQGJ26XtXLU_vGetSD3VDGptAseMqX69ae9Je/s320/expectations+create+reality+post+-+waai.png" width="241" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;">The good
news is that by altering our expectations we can improve our lives. The placebo
effect is well-known—when people think they’re taking a medicine even when they
aren’t, they often report feeling better. They expect it to help and it does.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-power-of-expectations-can-allow-you-to-bend-reality">According
to Chris Berdik</a>, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mind over
Mind</i>:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[P]lacebo
effects in medicine are just one example of how our expectations can bend
reality. For instance, brain scans reveal that expectations about a wine's
quality (based on price or a critic's review) actually change the level of
activity in the brain's reward centers when a person takes a sip.
Highly-trained weight lifters can out-do their personal bests when they believe
they've taken a performance booster. People who wear taller, better-looking
avatars in virtual reality behave in ways that taller and better-looking people
tend to act. For example, they approach better-looking potential dates and they
are more aggressive in negotiations, both in the virtual world and after the
headgear is removed. In lab and field experiments, people who stand in powerful
poses (think Superman) for a minute or two, have similar hormonal changes to
people who are given actual power and authority over another person, and they
exhibit the same sorts of behavioral changes…</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For
instance, many people worry that they're likely to choke under pressure. They
look to coaches and elaborate training techniques to overcome this tendency. Or
they just worry and bite their nails before important presentations or
competitions. But in one study, researchers told some track athletes that what
they thought of as pre-race jitters actually improved performance, while
telling another group that this sort of arousal was usually detrimental. The
athletes performed accordingly when the pressure was on.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Creating
reality through expectations is the basis of a lot of comedy and <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=abracadabra-a-classic-mag">magic</a>.
A comedian will set the audience up to have an expectation, and the joke
involves showing how wrong the audience’s expectation-induced reality is. This
is called the “incongruity theory of comedy,” and a lot of philosophers,
beginning with Aristotle, have subscribed to it. At the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/#IncThe">Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy</a> you can read some of these philosopher’s jokes:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhetoric</i> (3, 2), a handbook for
speakers, Aristotle says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create
an expectation in the audience and then violate it. As an example, he cites
this line from a comedy, “And as he walked, beneath his feet were—chilblains
[sores on the feet].”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Kant’s joke:
The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he
lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I
give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Schopenhauer
tells of the prison guards who allowed a convict to play cards with them, but
when they caught him cheating, they kicked him out. He comments, “They let
themselves be led by the general conception, ‘Bad companions are turned out,’
and forget that he is also a prisoner, i. e., one whom they ought to hold fast.”</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Groucho Marx
was famous for puns, which are all about exploiting an audience’s expectations.
There are hundreds to choose from, here’s a couple:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“I've had a
perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“When you're
in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in
the cell next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun'.”</span></blockquote>
<!--EndFragment--></span><br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-81897635580638229752013-09-18T13:29:00.001-07:002014-09-23T08:34:37.339-07:00Pride's Gotta Go Too<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">One aspect
of the philosophy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/Book.html">We Are ALL Innocent
by Reason of Insanity</a></i> is the rejection of free will. (See these blog
posts: <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/10/science-is-destroying-concept-of-free.html">general</a>, <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/10/consequences-of-no-free-will-society.html">societal consequences</a>, <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/11/consequences-of-no-free-will-personal.html">personal consequences</a>.) There are many consequences of letting go of the belief in free will;
these include the elimination of blame and guilt. If, in any situation, I
couldn’t have done any differently there is nothing to feel guilty about. This
is pretty easy to swallow. But another of the consequences seems a little
harder. This is the flip side of guilt: if I couldn’t have done any
differently, there is nothing to feel pride about. This seems cruel and unjust.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Many of us
have worked hard in our lives, in school, at our profession, in our marriages,
and it seems only just that we feel pride when we have achieved success.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The New Yorker</span></i><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> recently published a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/09/09/130909crat_atlarge_gladwell">review
by Malcolm Gladwell</a> of a new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://thesportsgene.com/">The Sports Gene</a></i>, by David Epstein (you can watch his <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger">TED talk here</a>), that is pertinent to the issue of pride:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sports Gene</i> there are
countless…examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different
from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of
their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry
genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For example,
the book reveals that major league baseball players have superior eyesight
compared to the average person. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested four
hundred professional baseball players and found the average visual acuity was
20/13. When he looked at the Los Angeles Dodgers, half had 20/10 vision, and a
small number fell below 20/9, “flirting with the theoretical limit of the human
eye,” according to Epstein. Gladwell concludes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The ability
to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an
hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight
commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The question
here is: should those baseball players be proud of their ability?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Of course
those baseball players worked hard to get where they are; the fact that they
are members of a professional baseball team didn’t happen just because of their
good eyesight. Epstein reveals that even the ambition to work hard is not
shared evenly among the whole population. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sports Illustrated</i> article he wrote (unfortunately <i>Sports Illustrated</i> has taken this article down since the book was published),<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But
researchers have found that even motivation to work out has an important
genetic component. A 2006 Swedish study of more than 13,000 sets of fraternal
and identical twins—fraternal twins share half their genes on average, while
identical twins share all of them—found that the exercise tendencies of
identical twins were twice as likely to be similar as those of fraternal twins.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Another 2006
study, of more than 37,000 pairs of adult fraternal and identical twins from
six European countries and Australia, concluded that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">about half to three quarters of the variation in the amount of exercise
people engaged in could be accounted for by their genetic makeup, while
environmental factors, such as access to a gym, often had less influence.</b></span> [<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria;">my bold]</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"></b></span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Wayne
Gretzky famously said, “Maybe it wasn't talent the Lord gave me, maybe it was
the passion.” But what if the two are inextricable? What if passion is a
talent?</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What if
passion were a talent? Exactly. The passion that motivates an individual to
devote his life to the physical training required of a professional sport, or
to practice the piano eight hours a day, or to pursue a Ph.D. in particle
physics is not “freely chosen” by the person. It is created through the
interaction of that person’s physiological makeup and psychological
programming. I know scientists whose field of study was clear at the age of
seven: they had a fascination with bugs or stars in childhood that lasted all
their lives. Novak Djokovic, the tennis star, began to hang around a tennis
court at age six, and when he began playing that year the tennis pro said it
was obvious he had extraordinary talent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Of course
this passion doesn’t have to be obvious as a child. One of the scientists
involved in Curiosity, the latest Mars rover, didn’t become interested in
astronomy until he was in his 20s. According to “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=3">The
Martian Chroniclers</a>” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Yorker</i>
again) </span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 17.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Adam
Steltzner, the leader of the team in charge of entry, descent, and landing</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, dropped out of college and, at age 21, was working as a
musician. One night as he drove home from a gig he noticed the stars overhead
and wanted to learn more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 17.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A few weeks later, he went to the local community college to sign
up for an astronomy class. Told that he had to take physics first, he
reluctantly agreed, only to discover that he had a knack for it. More than a
knack, really. “I just fucking dominated,” he told me. “There were tests where
the average was thirty per cent and I would have a ninety-eight. I was the <i>dude</i>.”</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Steltzner
ended up with a Ph.D. and a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But how many
of us have looked up at the sky in wonder and been content with a trip to the
planetarium, or taking a single course, or just cruising around the Internet
looking at photos. We didn’t have the ability to understand physics, or the
drive to keep learning and working that this man had. Should Steltzner feel
pride at his accomplishment?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Another
element that Epstein discovered was that not everyone responded to training
equally. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Even after five months of
training, some people in families that benefited little on average did not
improve their aerobic capacity one iota, while others in families that
generally showed marked improvement increased it up to 50%. Statistical
analysis showed that about half of a person's ability to improve with training
was determined by his or her parents. The amount any person improved in the
study had nothing to do with how good he was to begin with—his "baseline
aerobic capacity"—but about half of that baseline, too, was attributable
to family inheritance.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So for some of us, even
if we have the passion to undertake a sport, our physiology might mean we are
incapable of improving. So for those born with the capacity for improvement,
should they feel pride at their increased aerobic capacity?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</span></i><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
says that instead of pride, we should feel gratitude. Gratitude for our inbuilt
passions, talents, drives, and abilities. Gratitude for what those gifts allow
us to accomplish in life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Pride means we are
claiming a control over life that we do not have. It reminds me of the folk
saying </span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“‘My, look
at the dust we raise,’ said the ants on the chariot wheel.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Everything is interconnected. Say I made an apple pie that I was
proud of. Did I make the apples that taste so good? Did I grow the wheat,
create the cows that produced the butter? Carl Sagan once said that in order to
truly make an apple pie from scratch one would have to first bring the universe
into being.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=695779944884318691" name="ref_en_49_back"></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Because of the linkage of
guilt and pride there is a benefit to letting go of pride:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">You don’t have to take the blame if you don't take the credit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-12453851385856260332013-09-06T07:46:00.003-07:002013-09-06T07:46:56.726-07:00Plato's Allegory of the Cave<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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What is reality? Could it be
different from what we perceive? These are the questions addressed by Plato,
the Greek philosopher who lived 2500 years ago, in his <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html">Allegory of the Cave</a>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
Plato asks us to imagine a group
of people chained in a cave since birth. The chains prevent them from moving
their heads so they can only see the wall of the cave in front of them. A fire
is kept burning behind them. Other people pass back and forth between the fire
and the prisoners, carrying things. These peoples’ shadows and the prisoner’s
shadows are cast onto the wall that the prisoners can see. Understandably,
because it is the only thing they see, the prisoners believe that the shadows
are reality. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
The prisoners can talk to each
other; they form all sorts of theories and philosophies and scientific
hypotheses about the shadows. But the truth is the reality they think is so
real is actually just a shadow-world. The real world exists, but they can’t see
it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
In my terminology, they are
deluded about what is real; they are out-of-touch with reality; they are
insane. But within the prisoners’ consensual reality, within the “truth” of
their society, to be “sane” you must believe that the shadow-world is objective
reality.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
Plato then asks us to imagine
that a prisoner escapes the chains, makes it out of the cave, and sees
objective reality. After a difficult period in which his eyes adjust to the
light of the sun, this person realizes that the shadow-world is an illusory,
delusional reality. When this person tries to enlighten those still in chains
as to the truth, he is ridiculed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
But in fact he is more in touch
with objective reality than those who believe the shadows are reality. He is
the relatively sane one.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
This allegory is exactly to the
point of the message of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/">We Are ALL Innocent by Reason
of Insanity</a></i>. Our perceptions are like the shadows on Plato’s wall. Yet
we mistakenly believe that our subjective point-of-view is actual reality.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
Lately I have been wondering
what brought about the so-called Post-Modernist worldview, which began to
appear in the 1960s. In a major shift from earlier times, when it was accepted
that there was only one correct worldview, people began to recognize that
everyone has a subjective point-of-view. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
While watching a collection of
films made by Thomas Edison’s studio between 1901-1906, it occurred to me that the
advent of film played a role in this shift. We take it for granted today, but
imagine what it was like one hundred years ago to go into a dark theater and
see on the flat screen something that seemed so real. Of course people had been
attending stage-plays for centuries, but these could never approach the
simulation of reality that is true of movies.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
In addition, in an age when many
people never traveled farther than 50 miles from home, the images of life in
far-off places and of people behaving differently than the norms of the local
society must have been startling and revelatory. (The film “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095765/">Cinema Paradiso</a>” is a
fascinating look at the influence movies had on a small town in Sicily.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
While I was looking for online
versions of Plato’s Allegory, I came across a version posted by someone at
Washington State University, with this <a href="http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_reader_1/plato.html">commentary</a>:
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If he were living today, Plato
might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the
projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast
shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen,
and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. The essential point is
that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy
representation of it.</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
The essential point here, in
this blog, is that when we are confuse our shadow representation of reality
with actual reality, we are delusional, we are insane.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
In an earlier version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Are ALL Innocent</i> Arthur and I used a
movie analogy for the concept of “mind-generated reality.” We wrote: imagine a
one-seat theater in our minds in which we watch the film of our life. This film
is scripted, edited, and directed by the beliefs and assumptions of our
culture, time, family, and personal experience, and is projected on an internal
screen of awareness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
Arthur wrote a song about
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">PLATO’S CAVE</span></b><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 125%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">by Arthur
Hancock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Plato’s cave a prisoner dreams of
a place he knows is true<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">High
above this shadowed darkness that was once all that he knew<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave a chanced escape
sent him wandering from that wall<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">That
he'd studied for a lifetime that he'd never learned at all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave everyone was
chained with their faces to the stone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">And
their shadows were reality not just ghosts the light had thrown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave all the others
said that a life in shadowed chain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Was the
most that one could hope for there was nothing else to gain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave he escaped his
chains and he stumbled to the light<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">And he
saw the wherefore and the why and he saw the prisoner’s plight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">So to Plato’s cave he returned to
tell of the truth he’d found above<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">But
there his words of hope received more fear and hate than love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t
much but it’s all we’ve ever known<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">We’re
secure in this reality so won’t you please leave it alone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t
much but it’s all we’ve ever known<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 125%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">We’re secure within our misery so
won’t you please leave us alone</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; line-height: 125%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-19651765099031588182013-07-31T03:42:00.000-07:002013-08-16T13:13:07.895-07:00What Does It Mean That Many of our Memories are False?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<blockquote>
The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime. Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects.</blockquote>
<br />
This passage is from a <i>New York Times</i> article about research just published in the journal <i>Science</i>: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/science/false-memory-planted-in-a-mouse-brain-study-shows.html?smid=pl-share">false memories were successfully implanted in mice</a>.<br />
<br />
What does it mean that it is common for our memories to be false?<br />
<br />
When I was fourteen my parents divorced (the event was so traumatic I’ll admit to being a little fuzzy about my age). This was totally unexpected; my four siblings and I had no inkling that anything was amiss in our parent’s marriage. One night the whole family was called into the living room, and my father told us he’d decided to separate from my mother and was moving out that night. We talked for some time and then he left. I have a very strong memory that all my brothers and sisters cried, but I didn’t.<br />
<br />
Years later at a family gathering we discussed that night. All my brothers and sisters were there, along with our mother. Everyone shared their memories and how this had affected their lives at the time. One thing was stunning: <i>each one of us had the same false memory</i>. Each one of us thought everyone else cried but he or she didn’t. Our mother told us that we all cried.<br />
<br />
The fact that all of us believed we didn’t cry says reams about our family psychology. But the point here is that all of us had operated for years from a false memory that slanted our perception of a pivotal event in our lives.<br />
<br />
The premise of <i>We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</i> is that everyone is deluded about reality; we are all confused about what is true. Optical illusions are wonderful illustrations of how we don’t perceive sensory information accurately (<a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-do-we-mean-by-insane.html">see blog post</a>). False memory research shows we don’t accurately remember what happens to us.<br />
<br />
Our mind-generated reality is largely constructed from sensory input and memories; if both of these are faulty how can our reality be anything but false?<br />
<br />
“Delusion” means a “fixed, false belief resistant to confrontation with actual facts.” Even after my mother had told me I cried that night, I was resistant to believing her because my false belief was so strong. It had been reinforced by years of remembering.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist, has been researching memory for decades. In a 1997 <i>Scientific American</i> article, “<a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm">Creating False Memories</a>,” she wrote:<br />
<blockquote>
My own research into memory distortion goes back to the early 1970s, when I began studies of the “misinformation effect.” These studies show that when people who witness an event are later exposed to new and misleading information about it, their recollections often become distorted. In one example, participants viewed a simulated automobile accident at an intersection with a stop sign. After the viewing, half the participants received a suggestion that the traffic sign was a yield sign. When asked later what traffic sign they remembered seeing at the intersection, those who had been given the suggestion tended to claim that they had seen a yield sign. Those who had not received the phony information were much more accurate in their recollection of the traffic sign.<br />
<br />
My students and I have now conducted more than 200 experiments involving over 20,000 individuals that document how exposure to misinformation induces memory distortion. In these studies, people “recalled” a conspicuous barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all, broken glass and tape recorders that were not in the scenes they viewed, a white instead of a blue vehicle in a crime scene, and Minnie Mouse when they actually saw Mickey Mouse. Taken together, these studies show that misinformation can change an individual’s recollection in predictable and sometimes very powerful ways.</blockquote>
<br />
The “hindsight cognitive bias” is another source of false memories. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in his 2012 book <i>Thinking Fast and Slow</i>:<br />
<blockquote>
A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.</blockquote>
<br />
Mr. Kahneman discusses an experiment in which people were polled on a position on which they hadn’t completely made up their minds. After they heard arguments for and against that position they were polled again. Usually people’s beliefs were closer to either of the two positions than they had been before. But the most disturbing part of all was that the participants were unaware that their opinion had changed! And this was for a belief that the person had changed half an hour before!<br />
<blockquote>
Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead—an instance of substitution—and many cannot believe that they ever felt differently….our inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events. Baruch Fishhoff first demonstrated this ‘I-knew-it-all-along’ effect, or <i>hindsight bias</i> in 1972.</blockquote>
<br />
Mr. Fishhoff asked people to rate the probability of fifteen possible outcomes of Nixon’s trip to China and Russia that year. After the trips the same people were asked to recall the probability they had given to the different possibilities. People exaggerated their earlier estimate of the events that happened, and underestimated their estimate of the things that didn’t happen. In other words, their memory was skewed to “I was right.” Mr. Kahneman concludes:<br />
<blockquote>
The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion.</blockquote>
<br />
For the hundredth-anniversary of the Titanic sinking in 2012, James Cameron produced a film, “<a href="http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/titanic-100-years/">Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron</a>.” He integrated hundreds of hours of his underwater footage of the wreck with detailed schematic drawings of the ship to create, in his words, a new visualization of the sinking. <a href="http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/a-night-of-exploration/videos/titanic-dream-team/">In a promotional video for the film</a> he tells his team:<br />
<blockquote>
“It’s a good drive-a-stake-into-the-ground kind of moment. For us to say, ‘Let’s get the history right.’ To me the exercise in making the movie…was about understanding history. What is history? History is this kind of consensus hallucination.”<br />
<br />
A team member says, “There are some who tell the story of the sinking as if it were yesterday, and others who have been telling the story over the years, and the story changes.”<br />
<br />
“And how much does the telling of the story become the memory, as opposed to the memory itself?” Cameron adds.</blockquote>
<br />
I have this experience about many memories of my early life. I now remember the telling of the story more clearly than the actual experience that makes up the memory, and I’ve at times had the disconcerting thought that maybe I’ve just made the story up. And, as the not-crying story shows, I did sometimes make the story up.<br />
<br />
For me this is just one more reason for humility about what I know!</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-74774315035690625952013-05-13T08:00:00.000-07:002013-08-16T13:11:20.718-07:00E-book now on sale!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5irHsuqaKqSitEVRRL9WXH59TbjiF_yRuSlZovWzjrkH_cuhEbSukL0Pap9npqqipg9rXBAihVY61kb_-wI-wNTJiG0O3FiwGB4ZZixO92pX9bhP8zxinMNemHmf1BxhHCGI9qwZuJJlp/s1600/WeAreALLInnocent_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5irHsuqaKqSitEVRRL9WXH59TbjiF_yRuSlZovWzjrkH_cuhEbSukL0Pap9npqqipg9rXBAihVY61kb_-wI-wNTJiG0O3FiwGB4ZZixO92pX9bhP8zxinMNemHmf1BxhHCGI9qwZuJJlp/s320/WeAreALLInnocent_cover.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<i>We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion</i>, is now available as an e-book at <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/314016" target="_blank">Smashwords.com</a>, and as a Kindle ebook and paperback at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D1A900M" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a>. Click <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39503832/We%20Are%20ALL%20Innocent%20by%20Reason%20of%20Insanity%20preview.pdf">here</a> to download the first four chapters for free.<br />
<br />
Here's a brief description:<br />
<br />
Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately, but we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We erroneously believe our subjective reality is actual reality. We’re all insane because we’re deluded about what is real.<br />
<br />
What better explanation for dysfunctional human behavior than universal insanity? What better way to explain why loneliness, fear, and hatred are so familiar and love so rare? Why so many people need to use alcohol and drugs just to get through another day? Why half of all marriages end in divorce?<br />
<br />
<i>We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</i> presents the idea that the primary cause of human suffering is universal insanity. Insanity is defined as: confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality. In practical terms, this translates as confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.<br />
<br />
For example: “I made a mistake” is an objective fact. “I made a mistake because I’m a loser” is a subjective opinion. When I think and act as if the subjective opinion is an objective fact I’m confused about what is real. It is this confusion of fantasy with fact that makes me insane.<br />
<br />
Free will is shown to be a complete myth. Insane people do not have free will. We are driven by subconscious psychological forces over which we have no control. Recognizing our insanity means the end of blame, shame, and arrogance.<br />
<br />
In addition, the recognition of universal insanity is the key to compassion: we’re not right in our minds.<br />
By understanding that all hurtful behavior—from gossip to mass murder—proceeds from insane thinking, we can experience compassion for ourselves and everyone else.<br />
<br />
The book includes references to recent scientific and psychological research that demonstrates how out-of-touch with reality we really are. Other references range from Zen stories to the Three Stooges.<br />
<br />
I use examples from my own life to illustrate how we all build a personal subjective reality—My Story. I also share my personal growth as I face my own insanity.<br />
<br />
This book is for adult audiences. There is a chapter on sexuality and passages in other chapters that discuss sex in an explicit manner.<br />
<br />
Sanity is love. Love is defined as: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. This means that when we experience acceptance of reality exactly the way it is we experience love.<br />
<br />
This book may transform the way you see yourself and the world.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-72053548351127101442013-04-04T06:49:00.000-07:002013-08-16T08:21:48.593-07:00Like Watching a 3D Movie Without GlassesRecently I gave the following quick synopsis of the theory of universal insanity to a new acquaintance: “Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. But we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We confuse our subjective opinions with objective facts. We’re all deluded about what is real, and this is why we’re all insane.”<br/><br/>I could see that he found this a dubious proposition, and I was pretty sure it was because he was convinced that he <i>was</i> perceiving reality directly and accurately.<br/><br/>It occurred to me that the analogy of a 3D movie could help to illustrate the concept of universal insanity. When a 3D movie is being made, two cameras film simultaneously from slightly separated positions. The final film superimposes the offset perspectives. When you wear polarizing glasses those two images are separated and delivered to the appropriate eye, and you perceive the illusion of three-dimensions on a flat movie screen. But when you look at the film without glasses, it’s blurry, like it’s out of focus. If you watch it too long it’s disorientating and nauseating.<br/><br/>The more clearly an organism perceives objective physical reality, the better its survival chances. For example, when we are trekking through the jungle, if we can’t distinguish the crouching tiger from the obscuring foliage we’re dead. Humans are the product of over three billion years of evolution on this planet, and our ability to construct an effective model of physical reality in our minds is quite remarkable.<br/><br/>But there is another reality built in our minds, a subjective reality, and this doesn’t match physical objective reality exactly. It is offset from physical reality by a certain amount, depending upon the content of our personal subjective beliefs. This offset causes dissonance in our minds, analogous to the way the 3D picture causes nausea. This dissonance is our delusional insanity, and the more our subjective reality is offset from objective reality, the more insane we are.<br/><br/>As 3D films show, it doesn’t take much offset to create an uncomfortable distortion. This is why it can be hard for us “normal” people to grasp our insanity, because our everyday actions appear to prove that we are in touch with objective reality. We can navigate our cars through rush hour traffic, handle the demands of our job, shop for groceries, cook dinner, bathe the kids—all this seems to indicate that we are accurately perceiving objective reality. But accompanying these actions are the distortions caused by our subjective reality: we’re unhappy, or anxious, or depressed, or wish we could be doing something else.<br/><br/>We have all been programmed to think this internal dissonance is completely normal. It’s “normal” if by that word you mean what most people live with every day. It’s also “normal” in the sense of being an evolutionary inevitability. But this dissonance is exactly what we mean here by universal insanity. We confuse our subjective reality with objective reality, and when life doesn’t go the way our subjective reality thinks it should we feel anger, anxiety, or depression.<br/><br/>Recognizing my insanity means I stop trying to impose my subjective beliefs on objective reality. It doesn’t mean I don’t have a subjective point-of-view, it means I eliminate a lot of the dissonance—conflicts, disappointments, worries, problems—in my life.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-55581959703430718432013-03-12T08:39:00.000-07:002013-08-16T08:21:48.587-07:00Fear of CompletionFor much of my life I had trouble finishing things. I would start on a project, like making a quilt, and devote hours to it. Then I would find myself slowing down as I neared the end, and it would often just sit there, unfinished, for months or years. Sometimes forever.<br/><br/>Then one day I realized that I had a fear of completion: there was an image in my mind of the perfect finished product, and I was sure that what I was doing would never match that image, so I preferred incompletion, where I could continue to dream of perfection, rather than finish and realize my imperfection.<br/><br/>The aphorism “the perfect is the enemy of the good” seems apropos here.<br/><br/>Just recently I ran into a musician acquaintance and he told me how he just didn’t seem able to finish writing the songs he started. “They didn’t sound good enough to keep working on them,” he said. I told him how my musician husband, over the years, had recorded his songs and consistently hated the sound of the recording. Then, years later, he’d listen to the cassette tape or CD and say, “you know, this is pretty good.”<br/><br/>A component of universal human insanity is self-hatred. All of us are encumbered with doubts and insecurities.<br/><br/>It’s like there’s two parts of us. One is vibrant and alive and creative, wanting to share our vision with the world. The other part is fearful and dark and suspicious, sure that our vision is silly or worthless or stupid. This part convinces us that if we express ourselves we’ll be shot down as a fool—“you actually thought that was of value?!”—so we shut ourselves down. We censor ourselves.<br/><br/>Some years ago I produced a weekly one-hour TV show, and simultaneously wrote a weekly opinion column for a local newspaper. I was forced to get over my fear of completion! I learned how to just do the best I could, because I didn’t have time to hone anything to perfection. And one of the benefits was that by completing one thing, I opened up the space for something new. I found that all of that incompletion acted like a plug, blocking creativity and expression.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-16584427050770911792013-01-21T04:10:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.567-07:00Stiletto SurgeryWomen are <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/11/20/tiletto-surgery-removes-pinky-toe-for-better-fit/">cutting off their small toes</a> so they can wear stiletto heels. This is insane. Enough said!<br/><br/>The American Podiatric Medical Association says, “eighty-seven percent of women have had foot problems from wearing uncomfortable or ill-fitting shoes such as high heels.”<br/><br/>A collective belief of our culture is that women should have small dainty feet. We were all programmed by the story of Cinderella: the stepsisters’ feet were too big for the dainty glass slipper, and their huge feet were as much a part of their ugliness as the look of their faces.<br/><br/>How different are we from the Chinese who bound their women’s feet?<br/><br/>As a feminist once said about the Virginia Slim slogan (“<a href="http://archive.org/details/tobacco_leo23e00">You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby</a>”): “You haven’t come a long way and you aren’t a baby.”<br/><br/> Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-59446272155417295342013-01-01T02:05:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.558-07:00Search for a MotiveThe perpetrator of the latest American mass shooting—at the elementary school in Newton Connecticut—also killed himself and his mother. In addition, Adam Lanza smashed his computer hard drive before he went on his rampage. This, we are told by the investigators, is going to make it harder to find what motivated Mr. Lanza to do such a horrible thing.<br/><br/>When we say we want to find the motive for a crime, what we want is a clear, logical, rational explanation for an action that makes it understandable. However, when someone does something of this nature—a mass killing—you can be sure they were not thinking clearly and rationally. Sure they could think clearly about the guns, ammunition, clothing, etc., but this deludes us into thinking that the motivation for their action is also rational.<br/><br/>Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and was in charge of psychiatric services for the Massachusetts state prison system for ten years, begins his book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Reflections-National-James-Gilligan/dp/0679779124">Violence</a></i>, with this message: “The first lesson...is that <i>all violence is an attempt to reach justice</i>, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent…Thus, <i>the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.</i> [italics in the original]<br/><br/>I think Dr. Gilligan gives us the guidance we need in our search for a motive: somehow, for Adam Lanza this action was an attempt to achieve justice. It’s not too hard to imagine how Mr. Lanza might have perceived that his mother had caused him an injustice, but it’s much harder to get a handle on how killing children could undo or prevent injustice. I suggest we’ll never know for sure. All we can know is that in some way this action helped Lanza, in his mind, right an injustice that he believed had been done to him.<a name='more'></a><br/><br/>Dr. Paul Steinberg, also a psychiatrist, published an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/opinion/our-failed-approach-to-schizophrenia.html?smid=pl-share">op-ed about schizophrenia</a> in last week’s <i>New York Times</i>. Two of the pertinent points he makes are: disorganized thoughts are a component of the disease, and many people with schizophrenia don’t know they have it. It’s very possible, Dr. Steinberg writes, that Mr. Lanza was schizophrenic and was motivated by delusions:<br/><blockquote>Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior. This highly evolved brain area is weakened by stress, as often occurs in <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/puberty-and-adolescence/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier">adolescence</a>.<br/><br/>Psychiatrists and neurobiologists have observed biochemical changes and alterations in brain connections in patients with schizophrenia. For example, miscommunications between the prefrontal cortex and the language area in the temporal cortex may result in auditory <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/hallucinations/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier">hallucinations</a>, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. The commands might insist, for example, that a person jump out of a window, even if he has no intention of dying, or grab a set of guns and kill people, without any sense that he is wreaking havoc. Additional symptoms include other distorted thinking, like the notion that something — even a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions.<br/><br/>Schizophrenia generally rears its head between the ages of 15 and 24, with a slightly later age for females. Early signs may include being a quirky loner — often mistaken for <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/asperger-syndrome/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier">Asperger’s syndrome</a> — but acute signs and symptoms do not appear until adolescence or young adulthood.<br/><br/>People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. At Virginia Tech, where <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/cho_seunghui/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Seung-Hui Cho</a> killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. The parents and community-college classmates of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jared_lee_loughner/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Jared L. Loughner</a>, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. We may never know with certainty what demons tormented <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/school_shootings/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Adam Lanza</a>, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia.</blockquote><br/>Mother Jones magazine has put together <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map">an interactive map</a> that shows the locations of mass shootings in the U.S., along with information about the killer, weapons used, number killed, and whether the shooter had shown evidence of mental illness. From their research, the majority had shown signs of mental illness before they killed.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-19213001988384799932012-12-19T02:01:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.549-07:00Who Knows What is Good or Bad?Last night I watched James Cameron’s <i>Titanic</i>. One of the twists of the film’s story is that Jack, the protagonist, was not supposed to be on that ship. Just before the Titanic sailed he won two tickets in a poker game with two Swedes. When one of the Swedes realized that the other had bet and lost their tickets to America, he punched his friend out. This appeared to be a disaster for the Swedes, and a triumph for Jack and his Italian friend.<br/><br/>After boarding, Jack and his friend ran down the corridor of the great ship’s third-class compartment, and Jack shouted, “We’re the luckiest sons-of-bitches in the world!”<br/><br/>This makes me think of a Chinese parable: One day a farmer’s only horse disappeared. When his neighbor came to console him the farmer said, “Who knows what’s good or bad?” The next day the farmer’s horse returned accompanied by a wild horse, and the neighbor came to congratulate him on his good fortune. “Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer. The next day the farmer’s son broke his leg trying to ride the new horse, and the neighbor came to console him again. “Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer. When the army passed through, conscripting men for war, they passed over the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. When the man came to congratulate the farmer that his son would be spared, again the farmer asked, “Who knows what’s good or bad?”<br/><br/>In the movie, Jack and his friend ended up dying, and the Swedes were now the luckiest sons-of-bitches in the world.<a name='more'></a><br/><br/>I thought of this Chinese parable while reading Damien Echols’ book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0399160205">Life After Death</a></i>. Mr. Echols served 18 years in prison for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three">infamous West Memphis murder of three young boys</a>, although he was innocent of the crime.<br/><br/>It’s an amazing story of survival—an innocent man condemned to 18 years on Death Row. When I imagine something like that happening to me, I feel like I would go insane. Mr. Echols survived through extraordinary discipline: he meditated sometimes 5 hours a day, followed Zen practices for years, and read voraciously.<br/><br/>I read the book because I watched an interview with Mr. Echols after his release and I was very impressed at his calm demeanor. He did not seem angry or bitter.<br/><br/>Soon after the crime happened in 1993, an HBO producer in New York City saw a newspaper account of child murders, satanic rituals, and accused teen-agers, and suggested this as a documentary subject to two filmmakers. The resulting film, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murders_at_Robin_Hood_Hills">Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills</a>, which contained a lot of footage of the original trials, cast doubt on the courts’ decision that Mr. Echols and his friends were guilty. A group of people from around the country began to work together to raise both awareness of the case and money for lawyers and appeals.<br/><br/>(Three films were eventually produced, the last one in 2011. I saw all three “Paradise Lost” films around the time they were released, but I have just watched all three again after reading <i>Life After Death</i>. The documentaries are a fascinating look at many aspects of human nature, including the propensity of people to judge based on appearances and to assume that just because someone is arrested that means they are guilty.)<br/><br/>After years of public pressure, combined with new evidence (including DNA) that brought the three men’s guilt into serious question, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that they should be granted a new trial. The men were set free in 2011 before the second trial could take place. The state of Arkansas acted shamefully in making them plead guilty in order to be released; a transparent ruse to prevent them from being able to sue the state for compensation. Clearly the prosecutors realized that they would have lost the second trial.<br/><br/>As horrific as those long years were, I couldn’t help but think that some good has come of this for Mr. Echols. As he amusingly recounts in his book, his background included extreme poverty and poor education. As intelligent as he obviously is, his chances of having any real opportunities in life were very slim. He probably would have ended up like his father or stepfather, doing some kind of manual labor.<br/><br/>Mr. Echols was accused of the murders because he was an outsider. After the murders occurred, a month went by with no arrests, and the police were under intense pressure to solve this horrendous crime. Mr. Echols was into heavy metal music, his hair was long, and he dressed differently than the norm in black trench coat—he was a rebel, poor, and expendable. The police alleged the murders were part of a Satanic ritual—you may remember rumors of Satanic cults were big in the early 1990s.<br/><br/>The “Paradise Lost” documentaries made Mr. Echols into a star. His personality and intelligence shone out from the screen. In the third film in the series, released in 2011, Mr. Echols says, in a 2009 interview from Death Row, “In many ways I have a truly incredible life.” How can you not be intrigued by a person who could credibly say that?<br/><br/>Over the years many celebrities got involved in the case—Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), and Natalie Maines (Dixie Chicks)—and helped raise money for Mr. Echols’ exoneration. In my opinion all this happened because of Mr. Echols’ persona; even though he was onscreen for only brief moments in the films there was something captivating about him. One of the things the people who organized the “free the West Memphis 3” movement did early on was set up a college fund for Mr. Echols.<br/><br/>Mr. Echols now lives in New York City with his wife (who married him while he was in prison). His friends include Eddie Vedder, Marilyn Manson, and Peter Jackson of the “Lord of the Rings” fame (who produced a fourth documentary about Mr. Echols, “<a href="http://www.sonyclassics.com/westofmemphis/">West of Memphis</a>,” released in 2012). He collaborated on a song with Eddie Vedder, called “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwiqbCrkak0">Army Reserve</a>” (on <i>Pearl Jam</i>, 2006).<br/><br/>Damien Echols’ story leads me to wonder, who knows what is good or bad?<br/><br/>One of the excerpts from his prison journal has this passage that gives some insight into how he survived:<br/><blockquote>Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I’ve ever read. It said, ‘What is to give light must endure burning.’ It’s by a writer named Victor Frankl. I’ve been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it’s why we all suffer. It’s the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it’s amazing beyond words.<br/><br/>All my life I’ve heard people say, ‘Why would God allow this to happen?’ I think it’s because while we can see only the tragedy, God sees only the beauty. While we see misery, Divinity sees us lurching and shambling one step closer to the light. I truly do believe that one day we’ll shine as brightly as the archangels themselves.</blockquote><br/>William Shakespeare wrote: There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” [Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, Hamlet speaking]<br/><br/>Damien Echols has clearly learned to transmute bad into good; tragedy into beauty.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-7213326121893019672012-12-12T03:32:00.000-08:002013-08-16T13:14:22.070-07:00The Portal of Awareness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In an <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-umwelt.html">earlier blog post</a> I wrote about the “<em>umwelt</em>,” the individual view of the world created by a creature’s unique physiological ability to perceive its environment. For example, the internal model of reality of a blind bat is built through sonar, which creates a very different <em>umwelt</em> than that of a keen-eyed hawk that can spot a mouse from hundreds of feet in the air.<br />
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As another example, my husband Arthur is always smelling things that I can’t smell, and he’s often astonished at my inability to detect odors that he finds strong. But those smells just do not exist in my <em>umwelt</em>.<br />
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I thought of <em>umwelt</em> again because Arthur is working on an archival project, transferring tapes of singer-songwriters he recorded in the 1970s into an audio-editing software and burning CDs. One musician’s songs are marred by a hideous tape squeal—to my ears. Arthur couldn’t hear it and none of our friends could hear it either. But to me it was so loud it made the CD unlistenable. Arthur and I opened that musician’s computer file and I manipulated the EQ setting, creating a narrow band of lowered volume that I slid up and down the frequency scale until I’d removed the squeal (at about 8300 Hz). Then I played a song, toggling the EQ on and off as Arthur tried to hear the squeal. What was loud and obvious to me was completely nonexistent to him. This sound did not exist in Arthur’s <em>umwelt</em>.<br />
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A wondrous book I have been savoring for weeks, <em><a href="http://theforestunseen.com/">The Forest Unseen</a></em>, also made me think of the limits of not only my <em>umwelt</em> but every human’s. <a href="http://davidhaskell.wordpress.com/">Dr. David Haskell</a> spent a year observing a small patch of eastern Tennessee old-growth forest, and beautifully combines a meditative consciousness with a scientist’s mind. Dr. Haskell says we’re limited in our ability to see reality not just by the constraints of our senses, but also by scale:<br />
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We are tens of thousands of times larger than most living creatures, therefore our senses are too dull to detect the citizens of Lilliput that crawl around and over us. Bacteria, protists, mites, and nematodes make their homes on the mountains of our bodies, hidden from us by the dislocation of scale. We live in an empiricist’s nightmare: there is a reality far beyond our perception. Our senses have failed us for millennia. Only when we mastered glass and were able to produce clear, polished lenses were we able to gaze through a microscope and finally realize the enormity of our former ignorance.</blockquote>
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Humans consider themselves to be the dominant creature on earth, yet that is a misconception based on our collective <em>umwelt</em>. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in a 1996 essay entitled “<a href="http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html">Planet of the Bacteria</a>,” the attempts to characterize the earth’s history by naming eras after their dominant creatures—“Age of the Dinosaurs,” “Age of Mammals,” “Age of Man”—misses the creature that has been dominant throughout:<br />
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If we must characterize a whole by a representative part, we certainly should honor life's constant mode. We live now in the "Age of Bacteria." Our planet has always been in the "Age of Bacteria," ever since the first fossils—bacteria, of course—were entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.<br />
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On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on Earth. Our failure to grasp this most evident of biological facts arises in part from the blindness of our arrogance but also, in large measure, as an effect of scale. We are so accustomed to viewing phenomena of our scale—sizes measured in feet and ages in decades—as typical of nature.</blockquote>
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At the end of the essay, Dr. Gould summarizes the many reasons for assigning the dominant position to bacteria:<br />
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Not only does the Earth contain more bacterial organisms than all others combined (scarcely surprising, given their minimal size and mass); not only do bacteria live in more places and work in a greater variety of metabolic ways; not only did bacteria alone constitute the first half of life's history, with no slackening in diversity thereafter; but also, and most surprisingly, total bacterial biomass (even at such minimal weight per cell) may exceed all the rest of life combined, even forest trees, once we include the subterranean populations as well.</blockquote>
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Arthur and I have started using a new phrase, “portal of awareness,” to describe the process of perception. Ordinarily, we think that when we look or listen or smell we take in all of the information streaming our way. But this is incorrect. Our physiology and our psychology create a window, an opening with definite limits or borders, that allows in only a fraction of what is really out there. It’s impossible for us to even know how much we’re missing.<br />
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For me this is just another reason to be humble about my opinions. If I can’t perceive something it doesn’t exist in my personal reality. How can I be certain about any opinion, knowing there may exist something outside of my <em>umwelt</em> that would disprove my belief?<br />
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The <em>umwelt</em> shows that I know nothing absolutely. Everything I know is conditional, provisional, limited.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-69629034354739703002012-12-11T01:33:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.527-07:00Don't Want To. Must.Filmmaker <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lang">Fritz Lang</a> is best known today for his masterpiece <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)">Metropolis</a></em>. He made other great films, one of which is entitled <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(1931_film)">M</a></em>.<br/><br/><em>M</em> is a powerful film about compulsion and free will. Spoiler alert: A serial killer is murdering children, and the police are struggling to find the perpetrator. In their desperate hunt, the police harass the city’s criminals in their hangouts and generally interfere with their business. The criminals realize that to get the police off their back they need to find the murderer themselves.<br/><br/>Peter Lorre plays the murderer, and he brilliantly portrays the emotions generated by his compulsion: lustful attraction, agonized repulsion, and the irresistible pull towards action.<br/><br/>The criminals catch Lorre and put him on trial. Lorre tries to explain that he couldn’t help himself: he was compelled to commit the murders and regretted them later. At one point he cries in anguish, “Don’t want to. Must! Don’t want to. Must!” One of the criminals is assigned to play Lorre’s defense counsel, and he offers an inspired argument: if Lorre was truly incapable of acting otherwise, he couldn’t be found guilty.<br/><br/>I’ve given away the outlines of the plot, but this film is well worth watching both on its general merits, and also as a powerful statement about free will, the uncontrollable nature of compulsion, and what that means about punishment.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-32745035492727806032012-12-07T02:22:00.000-08:002013-08-16T13:16:00.274-07:00Is There Such a Thing as Race?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Think about race. What comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you think of White (Caucasian), Black (Negroid), and Asian (Mongoloid). Maybe with a little reflection you add Native American. (The terms in parentheses are the scientific names for these races.)<br />
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These categories basically conform to the racial categories I grew up with, which we crudely called white, black, yellow, and red.<br />
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Now ask yourself: What is the meaning of race? Does it mean there are significant differences between groups based on variations in physical characteristics? Does it mean differences in abilities as well?<br />
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Do you think one race is superior to others in athleticism? Do you point to the number of black football and basketball players, or the winners of the 100-yard dash at the Olympics?<br />
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Do you think that one race is superior in intelligence? Do you point to the results of IQ tests that show Caucasians and Asians with higher average IQs than those of Negroid extraction?<br />
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Let’s think of regions of the world. What race are Mexicans—are they white? What race are Egyptians—are they black? What race are Indians—are they Asian? What race are Australian aborigines? Think about Europe. Are the blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Norwegians the same race as the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned Spaniards? How do you draw the lines that separate races? What is the basis for the categories?<br />
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Now let’s think of specific people. What race is the current president of the United States? Barack Obama is commonly called the “first black president.” But he is equally Negroid and Caucasian. He is just as much “white” as he is “black.” To label him as a member of just the one and not the other is absurd.<br />
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To test your ability to sort individuals according to race, an anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist have created a <a href="http://utenti.unife.it/guido.barbujani/index.php?lng=it&p=10">race test</a>. When you visit this webpage, you are given links to two .pdf files. The first contains photos of 44 people from around the world, each numbered. The test involves creating your own system for sorting those people into racial groups. After you’ve done that, open the second file, which provides the country of origin for each of the people. How did your sorting match reality?<br />
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The two scientists are pretty sure most people’s sorting will not match reality, and conclude:<br />
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The anthropologists who, for almost three centuries, tried to compile the catalog of human races met exactly with the same problem and failed to solve it, until Frank Livingstone wrote that humans do not come in the simple, discrete biological packages that in other species are called races or subspecies. Modern biological anthropology developed from Livingstone’s intuition that we are very different indeed from each other, but our diversity is continuous and distributed in gradients, rather than discontinuous and interrupted by boundaries.</blockquote>
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What does the word “race” mean? <a href="http://Dictionary.com/">Dictionary.com</a> defines its meaning from an anthropological standpoint this way:<br />
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a. any of the traditional divisions of humankind, the commonest being the Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negro, characterized by supposedly distinctive and universal physical characteristics: no longer in technical use.<br />
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b. an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, especially formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups.<br />
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c. a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans.</blockquote>
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Obviously there are differences between humans. Certain characteristics have emerged in regional populations because of relative isolation over time. This inbreeding has resulted in the differential expression of alleles, which are variations of genes that all humans share. (definition of allele: “any of several forms of a gene…that are responsible for hereditary variation”). An example of allele variation is the amount of melanin in the skin that produces darker or lighter skin color.<br />
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Also, mutations regularly occur in individuals. When a mutation causes the bearer to survive better in the local environment, the mutation is passed on and becomes common in the local group. But these variations are incredibly minor compared to the vast amount of genetic material we hold in common.<br />
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In addition, there is no place where you can say a particular physical characteristic begins or ends. All physical characteristics change<em> gradually</em> over distance. This is called “clinal variation.” In “<a href="http://www.hum.utah.edu/~bbenham/2510%20Spring%2009/race%20and%20population%20genetics/Ossorio_Duster-RaceAndGenetics_AmPsych2005.pdf">Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences</a>" (published in 2005 in <em>American Psychologist</em>) the authors write:<br />
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Anthropologists long ago discovered that humans' physical traits vary gradually, with groups that are close geographic neighbors being more similar than groups that are geographically separated. This pattern of variation, known as clinal variation, is also observed for many alleles that vary from one human group to another…<br />
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[A]nthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the 30s and 50s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races.</blockquote>
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Race is a shape-shifter. The characteristics we pay attention to shift over time. One hundred and fifty years ago the scientific discipline of phrenology (skull-measuring) “proved” that the Celts (Irish) were not White. At this time, during the height of British power, the White race was equated with Anglo-Saxons, because the majority of British citizens were Anglo-Saxon.<br />
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In <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=celt+inferior+race&source=bl&ots=3geWxI1QiK&sig=3KyFitQ5WjDhwWUHBTZiqBg7meo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bViqUPztBI-m8QSlvIGICA&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=celt%20inferior%20race&f=false"><em>Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth Year</em></a>, Larry T. Reynolds (professor of sociology) and Leonard Lieberman (professor of sociology and anthropology) write about this British attitude of superiority:<br />
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In his <em>Races of Britain </em>(1885), John Beddoe proposed a similarity between the Celts and Cro-Magnon man. He also suggested that there had been a migration from Africa to Ireland, leading to traces of African blood in the Irish…It was a common belief in Britain during this period that only blacks and orientals were lower on the evolutionary scale than the Irish. In fact, some lecturers displayed a hierarchical arrangement of skulls in descending order from the Anglo-Saxons at the top to the Irishmen, and then the Africans and down to the Apes. In 1851 an editorial in Punch proposed that ‘the Irish were a missing link between the gorilla and Negro.’ Even Darwin (1871) in his <em>The Descent of Man</em> approved of the Galtonian [from the English eugenicist Frances Galton] idea that inferior races like the Celts threatened the superior races due to their rabbit-like multiplication.</blockquote>
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Today we can’t imagine how anyone could perceive the Irish and the English to be of separate races, but that’s because our measuring stick has changed. Now we’re looking at skin color. Back then those authors were looking through a political lens: using race to justify British superiority and dominance.<br />
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Genetic research, which has <a href="http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/minorities.shtml">established that there is no justification for dividing humans into racial categories</a>, has also found that certain populations carry genes that predispose members of that group to particular diseases. Ashkenazi Jews screen for Tay-Sachs disease, and people with African ancestry are screened for sickle-cell anemia. But this is no different from being asked by your doctor whether there’s a history of heart disease in your family. If your father and grandfather both died of heart attacks, the doctor will treat you differently than if none of your ancestors are known to have had heart trouble. It’s a family trait. The only difference between your case and that of the Ashkenazi Jews is the size of the family.<br />
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Why do I think this is an important issue? I don’t think you can separate the belief in races from racism. One naturally follows the other. Once you believe in separate categories, you must also believe in differential qualities and abilities. Whenever you draw lines you create an “other,” people who are different. Humans can’t think of differences without adding relative value—some people are better than others.<br />
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To divide human beings up into races is as arbitrary and subjective an exercise as dividing the world up into countries. Just as the boundaries between nations have no real, absolute meaning, so the divisions between humans have no real, absolute meaning.<br />
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The belief in races creates, however subtly, racism.<br />
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To eliminate racism we have to eliminate race.<br />
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If you would like to read more about this issue, see <a href="http://weareallinnocentbyreasonofinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-belief-in-race-is-example-of.html">another of my blog posts on the topic</a>.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-45438056368355196662012-11-22T03:10:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.514-07:00The UmweltYesterday I was out in the yard with my cat, and watched her lift her nose to the wind. She was reading the scents of our neighborhood in a way I am completely incapable of. Often times I have seen her sniff at a bush and wished she could tell me the story of who passed by in the night. I sniff the bush and I don’t smell anything.<br/><br/>I see my neighbor’s dog prick up his ears: he hears something that is totally beyond my hearing. What does he know that I don’t know?<br/><br/>There is a world of sense experience all around me that these animals smell and hear but I am completely unaware of. What else might be right here under my nose that I can’t sense? I think I perceive all of reality as it is, but my cat and the dog show me I don’t.<br/><br/>A century ago a German biologist noticed this disparity in sense perception and came up with a term for an organism’s personal reality: the <em>umwelt</em>.<a name='more'></a><br/><br/>Neuroscientist David Eagleman writes about this idea in his new book, <em><a href="http://www.eagleman.com/incognito">Incognito</a></em>:<br/><blockquote>What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology. This differs from the commonsense view that our eyes, ears, and fingers passively receive an objective physical world outside ourselves. As science marches forward with machines that can see what we can’t, it has become clear that our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world.<br/><br/>In 1909, the Baltic German biologist Jacob von Uexküll began to notice that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different signals from their environment. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, air-compression waves. So von Uexküll introduced a new concept: the part that you are able to see is known as the <em>umwelt</em> (the environment, or surrounding world), and the bigger reality (if there is such a thing) is known as the <em>umgebung</em>. Each organism has its own <em>umwelt</em>, which it presumably assumes to be the entire objective reality ‘out there.’ Why would we ever stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense?</blockquote><br/>The film <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show">The Truman Show</a></em> is a perfect example of someone confusing his <em>umwelt</em> with the <em>umgebung</em>. Truman is raised in a giant bubble, an invented world of actors, every moment of his life filmed for the ultimate reality TV show. But Truman believes his world is reality, not a fake—it’s all he’s ever known. What could ever make him question it? Eventually he starts noticing flaws, and the film documents his slow realization that his world is, in fact, <em>not</em> reality. We cheer Truman’s heroic effort to break through the limits of his <em>umwelt</em> into the larger reality.<br/><br/>Dr. Eagleman quotes an interviewer asking the film’s director, “Why do you think Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world?” The director replies, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”<br/><br/>The pertinent aspect of this concept in this context is that humans believe they are in touch with reality. We think our subjective reality <em>is</em> reality. The definition of insanity in this blog is “confusing our subjective opinion with objective fact.” When I sit on my porch and think I am experiencing reality I am delusional; I am only experiencing my <em>umwelt</em>. Recognizing this allows me to experience humility: I am aware of how little I know in any situation. My knowledge will always be limited.<br/><br/>Just admitting that my personal subjective reality is limited opens me up to be able to experience more of what is out there.<br/><br/>If you’re interested in hearing more about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt">tick’s umwelt</a>, here’s a discussion of it from Wikipedia:<br/><blockquote>The umwelt is for [Jakob von Uexküll] an environment-world which is (according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamben">Agamben</a>), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,<br/><br/>"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."<br/><br/>Thus, for the tick, the umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odor">odor</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid">butyric acid</a>, which emanates from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaceous">sebaceous</a> follicles of all <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammals">mammals</a>, (2) The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature">temperature</a> of 37 degrees <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius">celsius</a> (corresponding to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood">blood</a> of all mammals), (3) The hairy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography">topography</a> of mammals.</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-37245392579675132472012-11-16T03:36:00.000-08:002013-08-16T13:17:08.796-07:00The Belief in Race is an example of Delusional Thinking<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The book version of <em>We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</em> <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39503832/We%20Are%20ALL%20Innocent%20by%20Reason%20of%20Insanity%20preview.pdf">begins with an example of a common delusion in our culture</a>: the belief that humans can be divided into different races. I assert that there is only one race, the human race, and that racial divisions exist only in our minds.<br />
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This statement has caused some comment among readers of the book. They are convinced that racial categories are based in reality, which just reinforces the point of the book: “insanity” is defined as confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality.<br />
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Every culture creates a “consensus reality,” a collective version of reality that its members take for granted. This collective reality is made up of subjective beliefs and assumptions, many of which have no basis in fact, but it’s very hard to see that when you’re a member of the society because to you it’s just “reality.”<br />
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When we travel we perceive that other cultures have their own realities, and we call the experience “culture shock.” We look back in history and call an earlier society’s collective reality a myth.<br />
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But it’s very hard to question the assumptions of our own culture. As historian Nell Painter, wrote in her 2011 book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742">The History of White People</a></em>: “What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.”<br />
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What basis do I have for questioning our cultural assumption that races exist?<br />
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The Human Genome Project established, by analyzing human DNA, that there is no basis for the belief in separate races. Any differences that you can cite, such as skin color or nose shape, are superficial characteristics that have developed because for most of human history people bred with their close neighbors, so regional differences developed. However, these differences are minor compared to our similarities.<br />
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At the official Human Genome Project website (part of the U.S. Department of Energy), there is an article in their “Ethics” section on <a href="http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/minorities.shtml">what the findings of the Project mean about race</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity.</blockquote>
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A biologist at Washington University analyzed DNA from peoples across the globe. He concluded in a 1998 paper for the journal <em>American Anthropologist</em>, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," that there is no such thing as race. Washington University put out this press release about his article, entitled <a href="http://wupa.wustl.edu/record_archive/1998/10-15-98/articles/races.html">“Biological Differences Among Races Do Not Exist”</a>:<br />
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Templeton said, “Humans are one of the most genetically homogenous species we know of. There's lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it's basically at the individual level. The between-population variation is very, very minor.”<br />
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Among Templeton's conclusions: There is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that “racial traits” are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations.</blockquote>
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The American Anthropological Association, in their 1998 <a href="http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm">Statement on 'Race'</a>, makes it very clear that there is no such thing as separate races. This, they say, “represents the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.”<br />
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In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies <em>within</em> so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.</blockquote>
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Nell Irvin Painter, professor of American History at Princeton University, asserts in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742">The History of White People</a></em> that the concept of color defining race is a relatively new invention. Up until about the 1700s, people were defined by their geographic region. Prejudice mostly consisted of “my people are best, other people are inferior.”<br />
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A couple of thousand years ago, cultures in the Mediterranean region believed that people from the Caucasus were the most beautiful people in the world. Ironically this meant Caucasians were highly valued as slaves, especially the women who were revered for their pale skin.<br />
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It wasn’t until the scientific era, when scientists began chopping everything up into categories, that the idea of separate races, even separate species, of humanity really took hold. And then, of course, it was the group who wrote the science that made up the racial categories. As in war where the victors write the history, so in science. Since this period was the ascent of the English, who were Anglo-Saxon, the race “scientifically” judged to be best were the Anglo-Saxons. The old term for the most attractive people, Caucasian, was then given to this “superior” race.<br />
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The American Anthropological Association also asserts in its “Statement on Race” that the British and Americans used the invented concept of race as a justification for their exploitation of “lesser” peoples around the globe. In this country it was a very convenient rationale for African slavery and the genocide of the native American population. The "Statement on Race" includes this passage:<br />
<blockquote>
Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.</blockquote>
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The United States was a WASP country from the beginning, and every other group—be it Catholics, southern Europeans, Jews, Asians, or Latinos—had to fight for acceptance against entrenched “whites are superior” prejudice.<br />
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The 2012 election showed that many conservatives believe that the United States should always be a “white” country. They bemoan the fact that Barack Obama was able to win the presidency even though he won a minority of white voters—the first time this has happened in our nation’s history.<br />
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On election night <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/11/07/whites_only_gop_meets_its_demographic_destiny/">Bill O’Reilly said</a> on FOX News:<br />
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“Obama wins because it’s not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things.”</blockquote>
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Whenever conservatives complain about traditional America being lost, what they really mean is this: the “darkies” are taking over from the whites and this means the inevitable decline of our nation.<br />
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Surprising to us today, the “white” racial category did not at first include many peoples that we would unthinkingly consider to be white, such as the Irish and French. They, Ms. Painter tells us, were considered to be members of the ignoble Celt race. If you don’t believe me, watch John Stewart instruct Bill O’Reilly in the <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-15-2012/it-was-the-best-of-times--it-was-the-best-of-times">history of anti-Irish prejudice in this country</a>.<br />
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[As an aside, I can’t think of Ms. Painter’s book without also thinking of Martin Mull’s spoof on WASP culture: <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-History-White-People-America/dp/0399511938">The History of White People in America</a></em>.]<br />
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American history is filled with sordid stories of people being discriminated against because of spurious racial theories. Slavery and the ongoing discrimination against African-Americans is a well-known national shame.<br />
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Less well known is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States">popularity of eugenics in this country</a>. Eugenics is the attempt to purify the race of a country by eliminating undesirable elements from the breeding population. Developed in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics was a widely accepted “scientific” theory that confirmed the superiority of the ruling elite—that is, WASPs. These theories said that White Anglos-Saxons were rich and powerful because they were racially superior to the darker peoples.<br />
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Hitler was influenced in his thinking by the eugenicist movement in this country.<br />
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Eugenics led to the forced sterilization of thousands of people judged to be genetically inferior—the only thing that slowed this movement down in this country was the defeat of Hitler. Suddenly eugenics was no longer a popular cause, but sterilizations continued in some states until the 1970s!<br />
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Eugenics also influenced which groups were allowed to immigrate to this country. “Inferior” southern Europeans had more difficulty than “superior” northern Europeans, and Asians were considered so undesirable that attempts were made to keep them out of the country entirely. In 1882 immigration from China was completely ended, and in 1917 the immigration-exclusion zone was expanded to include a huge swath of the Earth—from the Middle East to Indonesia.<br />
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PBS aired a three-part documentary called <a href="http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm">“Race: The Power of an Illusion”</a> in 2003. The third part is about the consequences of our society’s racial beliefs, which includes <a href="http://newsreel.org/guides/race/pressreleasecredit.htm">this information about the battle of Asians to be allowed to immigrate</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
The 1790 Naturalization Act had limited naturalized citizenship to “free, white persons.” In 1915, Takeo Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had attended the University of California, appealed the rejection of his citizenship application. He argued that his skin was as white as any “white” person. But he also argued that race shouldn’t matter - what mattered most was one's beliefs. The Supreme Court ruled against him, saying that Ozawa may be white but he was not Caucasian, and according to scientific evidence only Caucasians could be white people.<br />
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Several months later, Bhagat Singh Thind, a South Asian immigrant and U.S. Army veteran, argued that he should be granted citizenship since scientists classified Indians as Caucasians. The Court, refuting its own reasoning in Ozawa said Thind may well be Caucasian but he wasn’t “white.” Petition denied.</blockquote>
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Clearly, the belief in the reality of races has been deeply ingrained in the belief system of our culture. It is a lie. There are no separate races. There is only the human race. To continue to believe otherwise is to be under the spell of delusion.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-81778435090191293862012-11-08T04:32:00.000-08:002013-08-16T08:21:48.501-07:00Delusional Thinking in ActionThis week presented an excellent example of delusional thinking in action: the U.S. Presidential election. Many Republican strategists and conservative pundits predicted not only a <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/11/06/karl-roves-prediction-mitt-romney-wins-285-electoral-votes-to-president-obamas-253/">Romney victory</a>, but a l<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/romney-landslide-black-helicopters/2012/11/05/id/462770">andslide</a>. This delusional reality was so strong that it led to such embarrassments as Karl Rove’s live meltdown on election night (<a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-7-2012/post-democalypse-2012---america-takes-a-shower---karl-rove-s-math">watch John Stewart’s treatment</a>).<br/><br/>This is an excellent example of how a culture can create its own reality, and the members of that culture will believe in a truth even when the evidence is against it.<br/><br/>In the days leading up to the election the right-wing true believers accused the polling companies of bias because the numbers didn’t fit their beliefs. (Even though this didn’t make any sense: if the pollsters were biased towards Obama, predicting a Democratic victory would mean liberals would be less motivated to go to the polls. I believe one of the reasons turnout was so high is because liberals believed Obama might lose. But this is typical of delusional thinking: it’s not rational.) The conservative media spent those days discussing the liberal machinations of the mainstream media and how the liberals were conspiring to create misleading polls, instead of facing the true situation of their presidential candidate.<br/><br/>But it turned out that the people who statistically analyzed those polls using facts and not wishful thinking, eminently including <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/">Nate Silver</a> at the <em>New York Times</em>, were extremely accurate.<a name='more'></a><br/><br/>Of course this is just one more example of the delusional thinking that fills the right-wing airwaves. As Conor Friedersdorf <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/how-conservative-media-lost-to-the-msm-and-failed-the-rank-and-file/264855/">wrote in his blog</a> at <em>The Atlantic</em>:<br/><blockquote>Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. <em>WorldNetDaily</em> brought you birtherism. <em>Forbes</em> brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. <em>National Review</em> obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/11/the-big-lie/180117/">misrepresenting an Obama quote</a> in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously?</blockquote><br/>It’s easy to think of plenty of other elements of the right-wing delusional reality: global warming doesn’t exist, tax cuts increase government revenue, there’s a conspiracy to hide wrong-doing in the Benghazi attack, etc.<br/><br/>This seems like a good moment for conservatives to examine their beliefs, doesn’t it? But a quick scan of the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/">FOX news website</a> makes it clear that’s not happening; here’s two articles that appear on their home page two days after the election under the heading “BIAS ALERT”: <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/07/five-ways-mainstream-media-tipped-scales-in-favor-obama/">An opinion piece</a> lists five ways the mainstream media “tilted the scales” in favor of Obama. <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/07/obama-wins-with-backing-from-biggest-supporters-media/#ixzz2BeVkZUFh">Another article</a> attributes Romney’s loss entirely to media bias:<br/><blockquote>But the political bloc that most helped push Obama to reelection was the American media.<br/><br/>All throughout election night, pundits and reporters were talking about the <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/exit-polls-voters-improving-economy/story?id=17656990#.UJqt7m_R56J">economy</a> and how that had impacted the campaign. That was seldom the story the news media told throughout the election.<br/><br/>…<br/><br/>Networks that hammered President George W. Bush for high gas prices and high unemployment gave their candidate almost a complete pass – blaming Bush more than twice as much as Obama. On Election Day, unemployment was 7.9 percent, actually higher than it had been when Obama took office. Debt, deficit and underemployment were off the charts.<br/><br/>Obama didn’t win despite the numbers. He won because the media didn’t report them. They spent an entire campaign promoting social issues – abortion, gay marriage and more – where journalists near 100 percent support. The onslaught against GOP candidates was huge. The left/media strategy was merely to link Romney with any social conservative they could and hype what that candidate said.<br/><br/>…<br/><br/>Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were savaged for being out of the mainstream by the press. However, journalists yawned as Democrats continued their massive leftward shift with Fauxcahontas candidate Elizabeth Warren and the first openly gay senator, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.<br/><br/>It was more than that. Pick an Obama scandal and the media skipped it, covered it up or buried it beneath some bogus outrage about the right. "Fast and furious," Libya, jobs, the collapse of Arab Spring, the failed trillion-dollar stimulus, the cost of ObamaCare, the attack on religious rights and even bowing to foreign leaders – none of them got the press that made-up scandals about Romney received.</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10014702662672465540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-695779944884318691.post-42996049915389663642012-11-08T03:22:00.000-08:002013-08-16T13:18:32.568-07:00Virtual Reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is the first chapter of the manuscript version of <a href="http://www.innocentbyreasonofinsanity.com/Book.html">We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity</a>, by Kathleen Brugger.<br />
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Thomas Jefferson is revered in the United States, in part for his inspiring language in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Noble words, but ones which reveal an astonishing cognitive dissonance in the mind of the man who wrote them. Thomas Jefferson is infamous for being a slave owner. Clearly he could believe in the ideal of liberty and equality for “all men,” yet simultaneously believe that <em>some</em> men could be enslaved and treated unequally because of their skin color.<br />
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Today we congratulate ourselves that we’re beyond this kind of confused thinking on race, but most of us still believe in the concept of race itself. We think there really are “Caucasian” and “Asian” and “Black” humans. But, according to the majority of anthropologists, the concept of race exists entirely in our minds; there is only <em>one</em> race, the human race.<br />
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Yet this mind-generated reality of separate races has caused enormous suffering for millions of humans through our history, and continues today. People are still killed, imprisoned, and discriminated against because of a completely illusory “reality” that racial categories exist.<br />
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Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. That is not true at all. Each of us creates, and lives in, our own individual reality.<br />
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A friend of mine shaved off <em>half</em> his moustache one morning, and then walked around all day enjoying people’s reactions. He couldn’t believe how long it took most people to become aware of his half-moustache.<br />
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People “saw” him with his moustache intact—entirely missing the reality that half of it was gone—because they were seeing a mind-generated reality, not the objective reality in front of them. When they finally noticed that half his moustache was missing their faces always registered shock (realizing how out of touch with reality they were) before dissolving into laughter.<br />
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When I was a teenager my favorite book was “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” by Carson McCullers. Not long after I met Arthur, my husband of over thirty years, I went to his apartment and this was one of three books on his desk. But I was surprised when I heard him talk about it, because it sounded like he was describing a completely different book. I told the story of a young girl whose dreams of a creative life were squashed by economic realities. Arthur told the story of a deaf-mute and the people who found in him an outlet to express their frustrations and dreams. One book, but two very separate realities.<br />
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Think of the most basic element of any argument: “You’re wrong,” “No, <em>you’re</em> wrong.” From a couple arguing about who forgot to mail the rent check to two nations fighting a war over a disputed boundary, disagreements arise from separate realities in the minds of the participants.<br />
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Psychologists tell us that we build mental models of reality which we use to navigate the world. We do not see actual reality, whatever that might be. We see only our mind-generated version of reality, and we erroneously conclude that our model of reality <em>is</em> reality.<br />
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What do we call someone who confuses their model of reality with reality itself? We call them delusional. Delusional is just another word for insane.<br />
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What better explanation for the human condition than delusional insanity? What better way to explain why loneliness, fear, and hatred are so familiar and love so rare? Why bigotry and war are still so common? Why peace and cooperation elude us? Why so many people need to use alcohol and drugs just to get through another day, seeking a satisfaction not available in sobriety? Why more than one in ten Americans take anti-depressants just so they can function? Why billions of human beings live in desperate poverty and ignorance while a tiny few live lives of wasteful luxury and self-indulgence? Why the human race totters on the brink of the supreme folly of self-extinction, via environmental collapse or thermonuclear disaster?<br />
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Of course there are other explanations for this list of human ills. Judeo-Christian theology, a world-view that has exerted tremendous influence on western culture, says that humans are cursed with something called “original sin” and are, therefore, inherently evil. In addition, God gave humans free will and we choose evil because we <em>are</em> evil.<br />
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Many non-religious people also believe in free will and come to basically the same conclusion: humans are free to choose their actions, and the woes of humankind are the sad result of humanity’s propensity to choose actions that hurt others.<br />
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One of Gary Larson’s <em>Far Side </em>cartoons shows a plump young man stretched out on a psychiatrist’s couch, his mouth gaping wide in self-absorbed monologue, while the bearded shrink is quietly writing on his pad, “Just plain <span style="text-decoration: underline;">nuts</span>.”<br />
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Which is the better explanation for the chronic human ills listed above: “humans are just plain <span style="text-decoration: underline;">nuts</span>”—evolving apes understandably deluded about the nature of reality and necessarily making mistakes out of their confusion and ignorance; or “humans are just plain <span style="text-decoration: underline;">evil</span>”—stubborn wicked creatures who sadistically (or masochistically) use their free will to <em>choose</em> pain, suffering, and wrongdoing when they know better? Which explanation offers us hope for a different future? If we are just plain nuts then we have some hope of finding sanity. If we are just plain evil what is there to do? How does one overcome intrinsic evil?<br />
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If universal human insanity is the cause of the human condition, we can immediately begin to envision the possibility of a cure; we can begin to imagine the possibilities for humankind when we are liberated from our delusions. Imagine realizing that all our crimes and misdemeanors, our mistakes, and our embarrassing blunders are simply products of our delusional thinking and not willful wrongdoing! Imagine realizing that punishing ourselves and others for wrongdoing is literally as absurd (and counterproductive) as punishing the inmates of a lunatic asylum for misbehaving.<br />
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The idea that we operate from a mind-generated reality seems strange because it feels like we experience the physical world directly and perceive it accurately. For example, when I want to pick my shoe up off the floor I can accurately locate the physical object—the shoe is here on the floor, not over there on the dining table—and I can precisely move my hand to its location and pick it up. Surely this means I’m experiencing the physical world the way it is!<br />
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The disquieting truth is I’m not.<br />
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Just for starters, we have blind spots in both of our eyes. In the middle of the retina, where the optical nerve attaches, there are no light receptor cells. We literally cannot see part of the visual field before us. Yet our mental image of reality does not match what our eyes actually see; the picture in our mind doesn’t include large black holes in the center. Our minds fill in the blanks with what they think <em>should</em> be there, built from our expectations of reality, the information surrounding the blind spot, and our experience of how the world works.<br />
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Optical illusions are amusing and shocking because they let us see that we do not perceive reality accurately.<br />
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For example, in the illustration below the center bar is the same shade of grey all the way across, yet our perception is that it’s lighter on the right.<br />
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Clearly there is some mental processing going on that interprets perceptual information <em>before</em> it gets to our awareness.<br />
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We have to learn to see and hear. As infants we learn how to process sensory information to create a mental picture of reality in our brain. We are taught first by our parents and then by everyone around us how to interpret the input of our senses.<br />
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We look with our eyes but see with our brains.<br />
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A friend of mine described how, for most of his life, he had never paid much attention to pregnant women. But when he learned he was going to become a father, “Suddenly large numbers of pregnant women started popping out of the landscape. I found myself noticing them and observing them with intense interest. After the birth of my daughter this legion of pregnant females receded back into the mists of my indifference.”<br />
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Of course there weren’t more pregnant women than normal; it was just because of his personal interest that he saw them. And they didn’t suddenly disappear after the birth of his daughter; he was just no longer paying attention to pregnant women and so from his point of view they ceased to exist.<br />
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Our brains take the sensory stimuli generated by actual reality (whatever that may be) and create virtual models in our minds. We only see the mental representation of a thing, not the thing itself.<br />
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This means we all live in our own individual virtual<strong> </strong>reality. We do not see actual reality; we see our mind-generated virtual reality projected on an internal screen of awareness.<br />
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Our mind-generated reality is more than just a model of physical reality; it includes abstract, subjective perceptions also.<br />
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Psychology textbooks are filled with long lists of common errors in our subjective perception of reality. For example, there’s the famous “Lake Wobegon effect”: most people think they’re above average (a statistical impossibility). There’s wishful thinking: “I’m not really as fat as this outfit makes me look.” Denial: “I’m not an alcoholic—I just like to drink every night, and I’ve been doing it all my life without any problem.” Or, “I’m not in an unhappy marriage—we never fight!” (Because we never talk to each other…) Rationalization: “It’s okay that I steal paperclips from work because they’ll never miss them.”<br />
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These thinking errors can all be summed up in this line from the song “The Boxer” by Paul Simon: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”<br />
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Our mind-generated virtual reality is a construct built of preconceptions, beliefs, and assumptions that cause us to see our world and ourselves in a rigid and unchanging way. We are boxed in by our beliefs about reality.<br />
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Someone (the source is disputed) said, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”<br />
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Comedians make us laugh because they break open our individual reality-box: they challenge our fixed beliefs and force us to see life from an alternative point of view. They literally crack us up!<br />
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We like puns because they expose how our minds make assumptions based on the meaning of words. When it’s revealed that our assumption of a word’s meaning was incorrect, it turns our understanding of the joke upside down. Groucho Marx provides a great example: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”<br />
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At first blush the idea that we’re insane sounds like a horrible thing, but actually there’s great news here. Realizing our insanity can empower us by freeing us from the delusion that we’re in control. Because we’re insane we can’t be blamed and shamed for all those misdeeds and wrongs that haunt us—we’re innocent by reason of insanity. In addition, when we realize that everyone is insane, we have the key to compassion. We understand why people (including ourselves) do mean or hurtful things: we know not what we do.<br />
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Being innocent by reason of insanity is in no way a blank check or license to kill. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to do mean and hurtful things; it means we understand that those actions are motivated by insanity, not willful choice. We can still put people in prison if we can’t figure out any other way to prevent them from hurting others. But we will think differently about who they are: they’re not evil monsters, they’re sick.<br />
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Innocent has two meanings. The first is “not guilty.” Most of us believe that we <em>are</em> guilty—by reason of sanity. Happily, as we shall see, this is not the truth. When we recognize our insanity we realize that we are <em>innocent</em> of all the charges we have levied against ourselves.<br />
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The other meaning of innocent is “virtuous, flawless, without sin or moral wrong.” By realizing our insanity, we can experience this meaning of innocent; what I will call <em>innocence</em>: we are without sin by reason of insanity.<br />
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Innocence means to be filled with wonder, curiosity, and awe at the marvelous perfection and ever-changing complexity of the mystery of existence. The opposite of innocence is the jaded adult cynicism most of us are all too familiar with: life on autopilot, steeped in boredom, routine, and faked enthusiasm. Innocence means to be liberated from our false imitations of knowledge, from the fatal presumption that we know anything or anyone (including ourselves) absolutely. Innocence means to become as a child and see every moment as new and interesting.<br />
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To experience innocence is to be freed from the constraints that our beliefs about reality impose upon the ever-fresh present. To experience innocence is to be empowered to see creative possibilities in every moment. To experience innocence is to know humility, to be aware of the extent of our limitations. To experience innocence is to be, comparatively, sane.<br />
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After spending a lifetime convinced that we’re sane, the idea that we’re all insane is guaranteed to meet with some resistance. I know from experience how difficult facing this truth is, but I also know how liberating it can be.<br />
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Not only do I intend to show that insanity is universal; I intend to show that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it: the universe is unfolding perfectly and without flaw. The pageant of evolution must include the epoch of insanity. Evolving apes encumbered with analytical thought are bound to go bananas...before they work the problem out.</div>
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